City councilman wants to study privatizing Atlanta airport screening
Security lines that stretched for hours at the Atlanta airport during some of the worst periods of the ongoing partial government shutdown are prompting a call for an alternative to screening by the Transportation Security Administration.
“We are the world’s busiest airport. The world moves through Atlanta, and we cannot continuously be held captive by our federal government or by TSA,” Atlanta City Councilman Byron Amos said in remarks at a meeting last week of the City Council Transportation Committee.
Amos said he plans to introduce legislation seeking a feasibility study on entering the TSA Screening Partnership Program, which would privatize security screening at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport.
The political stalemate over Department of Homeland Security funding left TSA officers working without pay for six weeks. While workers have finally gotten paid this week for some of their past shifts thanks to an executive order, a Congressional deal for regular funding remains elusive.
Five-hour waits and missed flights
Over the weekend of March 21-22, airport crowds were “simply out of control, where passengers were experiencing everything from four- to five-hour wait times to get to their flight — in some cases missing their flight,” said Hartsfield-Jackson General Manager Ricky Smith.
Later this week is forecast to bring another heavy rush of travelers, as many metro Atlanta schools go on spring break next week.
More than 90,000 people are expected at Hartsfield-Jackson security checkpoints Thursday, and more than 94,000 are expected Friday.
One major airport, San Francisco International, boasted it is not experiencing the same problems other major airports have with long security lines amid the shutdown because it has privatized airport security screening.
It’s the largest of about 20 airports that have private companies handling security screening under TSA’s Screening Partnership Program. Security screening companies under the program are on long-term contracts, allowing them to continue paying workers even when TSA employees are not during a federal shutdown.
The City Council is scheduled to go on a two-week recess in April, meaning Amos does not plan to introduce the legislation until the next council meeting scheduled for April 20. Amos said that will allow time to hear out the industry on the issue.
“But it’s time,” Amos said. “It’s time to get it done.”
“This scene could be happening every year almost, to where there is something that is affecting the screening at the world’s busiest airport,” Amos said in an interview. “If there is a way for us to stop it, if there is a way to lessen the burden, then I think it’s up to us pretty much to try to figure it out.”
Airport continues to ‘work closely with TSA’
Smith acknowledged at last week’s committee meeting that the impact on airports with privatized security “hardly exists relative to other airports that are relying on TSA.” He heads the city’s Department of Aviation, which runs the airport and is overseen by the City Council Transportation Committee.
Another city councilman, Thomas Worthy, asked at the meeting: “How many times do we need to live through this before we as a city and you as Department of Aviation start exploring whether or not we need a model like that?”
Smith called that “a good question.”
“I don’t know the answer to that right now,” Smith said. “I do know that we have to work closely with TSA to figure out the best way to process passengers. And, hopefully, Congress will come to the conclusion that TSA and … air traffic controllers — that they’re not caught up in other political battles that have nothing to do with processing passengers or managing airspace.”
Hartsfield-Jackson reiterated in a written statement Tuesday it “has not taken any steps to pursue privatization of security screening operations.” It said security screening remains under the management of TSA.
“We continue to work closely with TSA to support safe, secure, and efficient screening operations for our passengers,” the airport said.
Amos said his idea for the feasibility study is “really a fact-finding mission.”
“We’re going to have to figure out how to fund this thing and where to get the people,” Amos said. He acknowledged with the size of Hartsfield-Jackson, “it would be a huge task to undertake.”
Amos, a former airport employee, said he also plans to suggest the idea of hiring former TSA workers who may want to work for the screening contractor — “just looking out for our workers as well.”
He acknowledged that “if TSA loses this contract, we have to disrupt people’s lives because there’s not another airport in city of Atlanta. … We would like to offer them employment.”
Opposition to privatization
The union that represents TSA officers is strongly opposed to privatization of airport screening.
American Federation of Government Employee National President Everett Kelley said during a press briefing that the current partial government shutdown “is not a mission failure. Not on the part of TSA employees,”
“What we need to do is fund TSA, fund DHS, so that they can perform the duties that they need to perform,” Kelley said.
Last year, AFGE posted that privatizing airport security “could compromise security” and that for-profit companies “focus on profits, not security or workers’ well-being.”
Screening at Hartsfield-Jackson was privately managed before the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, which led to the creation of TSA.
The idea of privatizing TSA was proposed in Project 2025, the ultraconservative blueprint from the Heritage Foundation that proposed to dismantle aspects of the federal government in a second term of President Donald Trump.
And advocates of small government have also supported privatization.
Chris Edwards, chair in fiscal studies for the Cato Institute, has studied airport security privatization and wrote in an op-ed last week that if airports could contract private security firms to handle screening, “that structure would insulate air travel from partisan battles in Washington and allow for greater efficiency and innovation.”
Smith, the Atlanta airport manager, raised concerns about long-lasting effects of the current partial government shutdown, effects that could last even past the time a deal is struck for DHS funding.
He noted that some TSA employees “are actually resigning” after working for weeks without pay.
If it takes a long time to bring those employees back or return to full staffing, “then that will further delay a recovery, even after Congress decides to fund Homeland Security,” Smith said.
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