The man who has never served government now runs airport security

THE SENATE confirmed David Cummins as the head of the Transportation Security Administration on August 7th, by unanimous consent. Mr Cummins's qualifications are not hard to find: he is a former senior vice-president at Serco, a British-American government contractor, with a dozen patents in transport systems. What is harder to find is any experience leading a federal agency, much less one responsible for the security of every passenger flight in America. His predecessors led the Coast Guard or helped run the FBI. Mr Cummins ran toll roads.

The choice is no accident. It is the human embodiment of a policy. The Trump administration is in the process of dismantling the federal airport-screening system created after the September 11th attacks, and replacing it with private contractors. Mr Cummins is not merely an advocate of the plan. He is its natural executor.

The mechanism operates on two tracks. The more ambitious is called TSA Gold+. It is a pilot programme that hands both passenger screening and the ownership of checkpoint technology to private firms. Three airports have signed up: Tampa, Charleston in South Carolina and Des Moines in Iowa. The administration has earmarked approximately $13bn for the programme. The second track is simpler and broader: the president's fiscal-2027 budget would require small and non-hub airports to join the existing Screening Partnership Program, which pays private companies to run federally supervised checkpoints. Participation would expand from 20 airports to roughly 220, cutting 8,400 federal jobs and saving $529m in personnel costs, offset by $477m in contractor spending, for a net saving of $52m.

The administration's argument rests on one observation that cannot be dismissed. During two partial government shutdowns in 2025 and 2026, federal TSA screeners were forced to work for months without pay. Some slept in cars. Hundreds quit. At airports using private contractors under the partnership programme, screening continued as normal. The vulnerability is genuine: a security system that grinds to a halt because of a budget dispute is a security system in need of reform.

To be sure, the proposal to cut almost 14% of the TSA workforce and transfer control of scanning technology to the same firms that lobby for the contracts is not reform in the ordinary sense. It is a transfer of public assets to private hands, with the government footing the bill. Under Gold+, contractors do not merely provide labour, as under the older partnership programme. They own the equipment. Critics compare the arrangement to selling a building to a developer and leasing it back. The $13bn allocation suggests the taxpayer's contribution will not be marginal.

The secrecy is another feature of the design. The union representing 47,000 TSA officers, the American Federation of Government Employees, only learned of Gold+ by accident, when a briefing flyer appeared at Orlando airport. A FOIA request filed in May drew no response until the union filed a lawsuit on August 5th. A private "industry day" on May 21st at TSA headquarters brought together representatives from Palantir, Amazon, American Airlines, United and major international airports. The union was not invited. The programme had been under development since at least August 2025, according to the lawsuit.

The structural incentive is straightforward. Private contractors capture long-term revenue from government-funded screening. Airports gain immunity from the political risk of shutdowns. The administration scores budget reductions on paper, even as total outlays are redirected into contracts. The union loses both membership and collective-bargaining leverage. Mr Cummins made no secret of his view: in his confirmation hearing, he told Senator John Fetterman that he believed the TSA would operate "more efficiently and effectively" without its collective-bargaining agreement. A federal judge blocked the department's attempt to strip those rights in January. The attempt to end them through attrition, rather than order, may yet succeed.

It is tempting to treat the debate as a matter of ideology, with one side wanting to preserve federal jobs and the other wanting to shrink government. The deeper problem is institutional. The question is not whether private firms can screen passengers. They have done so before, at airports including San Francisco and Kansas City. The question is what the system loses when the people checking your bag are employees of a profit-seeking bidder rather than federal officers with tenure, standardised pay scales and oversight by Congress.

The historical record offers a caution. Before the Transportation Security Administration was created in 2002, private security firms — Argenbright, Globe Security and Huntleigh USA — ran the checkpoints at American airports. The 9/11 commission described the screening as "marginal at best". After the attacks, Argenbright was found to have employed felons as screeners and was fined $1m; an executive received a prison sentence for falsifying background checks. At San Francisco, where Covenant Aviation Security holds a contract that has cost taxpayers roughly $1.5bn, the FBI found in 2013 that personnel had inadvertently helped drug smugglers traffic cocaine through the checkpoint. These are not isolated lapses. They are the pattern that emerges when cost pressure and weak oversight collide.

The counterargument deserves its due. Federalisation has not been flawless. TSA wait times have grown, staffing is thin, morale is damaged by repeated shutdowns and the collective-bargaining agreement Mr Cummins despises does constrain operational flexibility. A screening system immune to government funding lapses is a better one. The administration is correct that a system dependent on the whims of congressional appropriations is structurally unreliable.

Yet the solution to a shutdown problem is not to privatise. It is to guarantee pay for screeners regardless of the legislative impasse. A bipartisan bill, the Keep America Flying Act, would do precisely that. Mr Cummins endorsed it in his hearing. If the vulnerability is political, insulate the workforce politically rather than replacing it with contractors who will be equally vulnerable to government cost-cutting, only without the accountability that comes from federal employment.

The second-order effect that is being missed is not just security. It is institutional knowledge. The TSA is not merely a bag-checking operation. It is a federal presence at 420 airports, sharing intelligence with the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and local law enforcement. The agency's data-sharing arrangement with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, recently disclosed by American Oversight, has already resulted in more than 800 immigration-related arrests from over 31,000 traveler records. Private contractors do not have the same mandate, or the same oversight. Replacing federal officers with subcontractors may also replace a federal intelligence function with a bag-checking company.

Mr Cummins's confirmation is the signal. The work of dismantling will now be administrative rather than political, carried out through RFPs, timelines and contractor selections rather than through votes and votes. The first contractors for Tampa are expected by September, with full transition by May 2027. If other airports follow, the experiment will become the system.

The better answer is simpler, if less dramatic. Fund the screeners so they never have to face a shutdown again. Modernise the equipment without handing its title to a bidder. Keep the officers federal. The $52m in projected savings is not worth the loss of institutional continuity, congressional oversight, or the precedent that the most basic security function in American travel can be auctioned to the lowest bidder.