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Abolish the TSA

April 21, 2023

Every day, the Transportation Security Administration searches nearly 5 million bags for explosives, drugs, or other illegal products. Coming home through Chicago, one of those bags happened to be my carry-on. My bag and I were pulled for a random search shortly before my connecting flight back to Omaha was due to take off. The reason I was pulled? My Nintendo Switch didn’t come out of my bag. But the bored fascism didn’t stop there. I was hand searched for a discrepancy in my groin area. There ended up being no reason to pull me, and I missed my flight. But the full extent of the damage done by the TSA goes much further than making strangers miss flights and touching the groins of unsuspecting passengers. Getting rid of the TSA is the best option for the national security and budget of the United States going forward.  

In 2023, the TSA was budgeted $10.3 billion, and employs almost 60,000 Americans, yet it falls flat on nearly every endeavor it takes on.  Despite some very notable cases, airplane hijackings and bombings are quite rare. And the TSA isn’t even effective at preventing them. We can see this first and foremost through the DHS’s own undercover “Red Team” tests in 2015. Undercover investigators were able to smuggle mock explosives through TSA checkpoints in dozens of the nation’s busiest airports with a staggering 95% success rate. TSA members failed 67 of the 70 weapons smuggling tests, with “Red Team members repeatedly able to get potential weapons through checkpoints,” according to ABC News. Security expert Bruce Schneier does note that measures such as the TSA don’t have to be perfect: they only must be good enough to prevent hijackers from attempting attacks. But he continues that the TSA’s 95% failure rate is “embarrassingly high” and not even “good enough” for those purposes. And, as the Government Accountability Office showed in 2013, there’s no evidence that the agency’s Screening of Passengers by Observation Techniques (SPOT) program, which employs nearly 3,000 and attempts to scan passengers for suspicious behavior, is at all effective. The GAO continued to suggest that the government should limit future TSA funding and explained that the organization only arrests 0.6 percent of the people who are flagged. None of those arrests were designated as terrorism related. The TSA, as much as it would like to, does not prevent any of the actions that it claims to, especially terrorism.  

Moreover, there’s research that suggests a link between flight times lengthened by the TSA, and death from car crashes. Researchers at Cornell University in 2005 suggested that people switching from air to road transportation in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks led to an increase of 242 driving fatalities per month—which means that a lot more people died on the roads as an indirect result of the TSA and flight times than the terrible day of 9/11 itself. As Dylan Matthews of Vox in 2016 puts it, it stands to reason that having to get to the airport three hours before a flight drastically reduces demand for flights relative to a world where you only have to arrive 30 minutes beforehand—particularly for flights on routes where a two-to-three-hour wait dramatically increases travel time relative to driving, like New York to Washington, DC, or Boston to New York. That means more driving. Which means more death. 

Getting rid of the TSA entirely and not replacing it would be irresponsible. Pre 9/11, airport security was functional. People could show up to the airport half an hour before their flight, go through a metal detector, and be on their merry way to whatever destination they pleased. But in its current state, it’s a black hole that takes taxpayer money and a hinderance to travelers. It’s a zero-star rated act of security theater. 

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