TSA Privatization Returns Airport Security to a Dangerous Past ⁠57%

By Whitney Curry Wimbish⁠41%

8/3/2026, 2:00:00 AM

BS Summary: This article contains 34 faulty reasoning types, including Appeal to Emotion, Framing Effect, and Anecdotal, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 37.3% saturation with 542 hits. Analysis detected 2,940 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,455 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 47.4% and a BS Rank of ⁠57% (11,932 of 27,323 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 56.30% of the article peer group.

It was easy to get knives and box cutters past security on September 11, 2001. 
The men simply walked them through the privately managed checkpoints operated by Argenbright Security, Globe Security, and Huntleigh USA. 
At the time, security was the responsibility of each individual airport, which tended to give contracts to the lowest bidders. 
Some of the contracted security workers stopped a few of the men for additional screening. 
But as the 9/11 Commission documented , the extra checks were “marginal at best,” and their carry-on bags, which contained the weapons, weren’t examined. 
All 19 hijackers made it through to their planes, and they all took off, no problem. 
Then they used their little blades to execute the deadliest attack on American soil in history, killing nearly 3,000 people. 
That is the origin story of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), which President George W. 
Bush signed into law just two months later. 
Under the Aviation and Transportation Security Act , he federalized airport security for the first time, gave the responsibility to a new undersecretary of transportation for security, and instituted strict, uniform new baggage screening requirements. 
When Bush signed the law at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, he called it “permanent and aggressive.” 
Now, on the eve of the 25th anniversary of 9/11, the Trump administration wants to edit “permanent” to “temporary.” 
Under the new privatization program TSA Gold+, private contractors will next year run security at airports in Charleston, South Carolina; Des Moines, Iowa; and Tampa, Florida. 
While TSA workers will ostensibly provide oversight, they’ll no longer be in charge of screening passengers or the items they carry onboard. 
Private contractors will handle not only the screening process at those three airports, but the machines that scan people and baggage to detect prohibited items like explosives and weapons, a move that unions representing TSA workers and flight attendants say will endanger workers and passengers. 
According to Tampa International Airport, TSA will select contractors by September and security will be fully privatized by next May. 
“This is Project 2025, nobody should be surprised about this, this is about dismantling government everywhere, dismantling worker rights everywhere.” 
Sara Nelson, international president of the Association of Flight Attendants 
Trump also wants to force all small and non-hub airports to join the Screening Partnership Program, which allows commercial airports to use private companies to conduct security screening. 
Twenty airports have opted in to the program; the administration’s proposal would increase that to about 220. 
“This is a major departure and step backwards from the aviation screening security system that Congress created in the wake of the Sept. 11th terrorist attacks in 2001 and the deadly bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Scotland in 1988,” AFGE National President Everett Kelley said in a press statement. 
“Changes of this magnitude should not be made behind closed doors without the input of Congress, the flying public, the local airport authorities, and TSA employees themselves.” 
While this privatization gets going, the Trump administration’s proposed fiscal 2027 budget would eliminate 8,400 transportation security officers, about 14 percent of TSA’s workforce. 
It would replace a little over half of them with private contractors. 
The announcement, which the Trump administration made to AFGE earlier this month, is causing TSA workers to not only fear for their jobs, but for the safety of workers and passengers alike. 
AFGE TSA Council 100 President Hydrick Thomas told the Prospect that he has personally seen the sloppy practices of private contractors who handle security, sometimes in ways that might seem harmless, like letting a baggage handler skip security so he can board his plane for vacation faster. 
He also noted that some of the contractors working security prior to TSA were later found at fault for major failures. 
Authorities found that Argenbright employed criminals as security screeners and let a man with knives and a stun gun through security at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport even after 9/11. 
The government subsequently fined the company $1 million and sentenced an executive to 20 to 30 months’ incarceration for falsely certifying to the Federal Aviation Administration that the company had trained and checked the backgrounds of 1,300 employees responsible for security at Philadelphia International Airport. 
Those are the kinds of failures that TSA prevents and that bad actors can exploit, Thomas said. 
He noted that there have been zero planes hijacked since the Bush administration federalized airport security. 
“Our model was ‘We’ll never forget,’” he said. 
“Somebody’s forgetting.” 
THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT STARTED forgetting almost immediately after 9/11. 
It instituted the Screening Partnership Program just three years later, an instant boon to the security industry. 
Firstline Transportation Security was one of the early companies to get a contract of $55 million to run security at Kansas City International Airport for two years; Firstline later became a major client of former House Speaker Dennis Hastert’s post-congressional lobbying career, before he was sentenced to 15 months in prison for sexually abusing teenage boys when he was a wrestling coach at Yorkville High School in Illinois. 
Covenant Aviation Security was another early winner, getting $19 million for unspecified airport security services in 2005. 
Since then, it’s gotten an ever-increasing amount, including $773 million in 2021 to support security screening at San Francisco International Airport (SFO) until the end of this year; taxpayers have spent about $1.5 billion on that company, mainly for security at SFO. 
That airport is held out as the exemplar of how well private companies manage security, which labor leaders say is the case because Covenant workers at SFO are unionized ; as a result, they are better paid than security contractors elsewhere and can more strongly influence practices. 
But even so, the FBI found that some of Covenant’s security personnel helped smugglers traffic cocaine between 2013 and 2014 by allowing them “to pass through the x-ray machine at a security checkpoint line without adequately screening the luggage for explosives, incendiaries, weapons, or other threats to security,” as the Department of Justice wrote . 
California Town Lets Private ICE Detention Centers Police Themselves 
After the Screening Partnership Program launched in 2004, lawmakers continued to erode federalized airport security, sometimes to their own enrichment. 
Take Rep. 
John Mica (R-FL), who was the ranking Republican on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee in 2010. 
That was the year he wrote to 100 airports, telling them they should request private security guards instead of TSA guards, after PACs and executives associated with the private contractors who would benefit had poured $81,000 into his campaign fund. 
As Sara Nelson, international president of the Association of Flight Attendants, put it in 2019 congressional testimony , “To return to a bottom-line driven system that puts security second to profits borders on reckless and is an unjustified regression from TSA’s successful mission ‘to protect the nation’s transportation systems to ensure freedom of movement for people and commerce.’” 
Nelson told the Prospect that just as in the past, she and her union will fight the most recent incursion alongside TSA workers. 
“This is Project 2025, nobody should be surprised about this, this is about dismantling government everywhere, dismantling worker rights everywhere,” she said, referencing the Heritage Foundation blueprint for the Trump presidency, which calls for the privatization of aviation screening by expanding the Screening Partnership Program to all airports or by using TSA as a contracting entity. 
“The federal government could expect to save 15 percent–20 percent from the existing aviation screening budget, but savings could be significantly larger,” wrote Ken Cuccinelli, a homeland security official in Trump’s first term and the former attorney general of Virginia. 
Tormenting workers with furloughs and forcing them to work without pay, making air travel awful for passengers, is a rerun of 2018 and 2019, when the government tried “to make the system not work so that people beg for something else,” she said. 
Nelson said workers shut down the 2018 attempt to privatize the Orlando airport; they’ll shut down this newest attempt, too. 
“First and foremost, as we are about to hit the 25th remembrance of that day,” Nelson said, “this is an insane proposal from the government or anyone to be thinking about privatizing security.” 
Thank you for reading the first in our series about the Trump administration’s privatization of airport security by staff writer Whitney Wimbish and TAP fellow Zachary Groz; please watch for our second installment, which will look at the contractors that have been preapproved to privatize airport security. 
If you have information about airport security privatization, please get in touch on Signal at wwimbish.07 or email at wwimbish@prospect.org and zgroz@prospect.org . 
The post TSA Privatization Returns Airport Security to a Dangerous Past appeared first on The American Prospect . 
Article reasoning-pattern comparisonThis article: 9.1%Whitney Curry Wimbish: 3.0%The American Prospect: 4.4%Confirmation Bias9.1%This article: 2.4%Whitney Curry Wimbish: 0.2%The American Prospect: 0.3%Anchoring Bias2.4%This article: 8.5%Whitney Curry Wimbish: 3.1%The American Prospect: 1.8%Availability Heuristic8.5%This article: 4.6%Whitney Curry Wimbish: 0.5%The American Prospect: 0.7%Representativeness Heuristic4.6%This article: 2.7%Whitney Curry Wimbish: 0.8%The American Prospect: 0.8%Hindsight Bias2.7%This article: 0.0%Whitney Curry Wimbish: 0.4%The American Prospect: 0.9%Overconfidence Bias0.0%This article: 14.4%Whitney Curry Wimbish: 4.9%The American Prospect: 3.4%Framing Effect14.4%This article: 4.5%Whitney Curry Wimbish: 0.4%The American Prospect: 0.2%Loss Aversion4.5%This article: 0.0%Whitney Curry Wimbish: 0.0%The American Prospect: 0.1%Status Quo Bias0.0%This article: 2.9%Whitney Curry Wimbish: 0.4%The American Prospect: 0.1%Sunk Cost Effect2.9%This article: 2.7%Whitney Curry Wimbish: 0.6%The American Prospect: 0.8%Optimism Bias2.7%This article: 3.0%Whitney Curry Wimbish: 0.8%The American Prospect: 2.0%Pessimism Bias3.0%This article: 37.3%Whitney Curry Wimbish: 8.0%The American Prospect: 6.5%Negativity Bias37.3%This article: 3.2%Whitney Curry Wimbish: 0.4%The American Prospect: 0.3%Self-Serving Bias3.2%This article: 0.0%Whitney Curry Wimbish: 0.2%The American Prospect: 1.0%Fundamental Attribution Error0.0%This article: 0.0%Whitney Curry Wimbish: 0.0%The American Prospect: 0.2%Actor-Observer Bias0.0%This article: 1.6%Whitney Curry Wimbish: 0.3%The American Prospect: 0.6%In-Group Bias1.6%This article: 0.0%Whitney Curry Wimbish: 0.0%The American Prospect: 0.2%Out-Group Homogeneity Bias0.0%This article: 3.2%Whitney Curry Wimbish: 0.5%The American Prospect: 1.1%Halo Effect3.2%This article: 0.0%Whitney Curry Wimbish: 0.5%The American Prospect: 0.2%Horn Effect0.0%This article: 0.0%Whitney Curry Wimbish: 0.0%The American Prospect: 0.0%Dunning-Kruger 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0.0%Whitney Curry Wimbish: 0.2%The American Prospect: 0.1%Politically Right Leaning Bias0.0%This article: 1.6%Whitney Curry Wimbish: 0.1%The American Prospect: 0.2%Attempt to Sell a Product or S…1.6%

1455 words analyzed.

Speakers

6speakers37%attributed speech923writer words
Selected voice

Sara Nelson

96%flagged-word coverage
243 attributed words46% of attributed speech78% writer coverage
0%5.0%10.0%Biased Writer Voice-5.5 ptsWriter: 5.5%Sara Nelson: 0.0%0.0%Unattributed Quote-2.6 ptsWriter: 2.6%Sara Nelson: 0.0%0.0%Attempt to Sell a Product -2.5 ptsWriter: 2.5%Sara Nelson: 0.0%0.0%Quote-first Misdirection-1.8 ptsWriter: 1.8%Sara Nelson: 0.0%0.0%

Attribution is sentence-level. Pattern percentages are calculated only from words assigned to that voice.

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Analysis

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