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For several weeks, exasperated travelers across the United States have found themselves mired in lengthy security lines at airports. The reason? Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agents, inundated with work, have been operating without compensation. This has led to significant delays for those trying to catch flights.
This isn’t the first instance where TSA funding, which plays a crucial role in the daily lives of millions of Americans, has become a pawn in a congressional tug-of-war, currently centered on immigration enforcement debates.
It’s a situation that doesn’t have to persist.
In truth, such a scenario should never have occurred, not even once.
The irony lies in the fact that both taxpayers and travelers have already contributed to the cost of transportation security—not through their taxes, but via their plane tickets.
The federally mandated Passenger Security Fee, first levied after the 9/11 terrorist attacks to help fund TSA screening activities, has more than doubled since its inception.
Today, it adds an $11.20 charge to every round-trip ticket purchase — more than $4.5 billion in 2025 alone.
The fee is one of multiple government-mandated add-on charges, including a ticket excise tax, flight segment fees and passenger facility charges, that add taxes of 15% to 30% on every airline ticket you buy.
And while the lion’s share of Passenger Security Fee revenue was supposed to stay with TSA, Congress has chosen to divert much of it to feed an already fattened hyena.
Bipartisan Budget Acts passed in 2013 and 2018 funneled huge chunks of Passenger Security Fee proceeds away from TSA and into the Treasury’s general fund, where it can be spent in any way government officials want.
Congress deceptively portrayed that decision as a matter of “deficit reduction,” but we can see how well that’s worked.
If these resources had remained with TSA where they belonged, the agency could have built up an emergency fund to help tide these essential workers over during government shutdowns.
Or maybe the cash could have enabled technology investments to speed passengers through checkpoints all year round.
Airlines would be on solid moral, if not legal, ground to pull out of this charade and simply stop collecting the Passenger Security Fee.
They are not responsible for this mess: The blame belongs at the big, bloated feet of our federal government.
To do right by taxpayers, who are now literally paying $11.20 apiece to wait in line, Congress and President Donald Trump have four choices.
First, they can stop squandering Passenger Security Fee revenues on unrelated federal programs.
This means repealing the provisions from the 2013 and 2018 laws that allow these shenanigans, requiring the funds to be directly spent on TSA operations and investments and capping the fee so taxpaying travelers aren’t gouged for government services.
The only permissible diversion of any collections should be a small share for TSA’s Inspector General, which should oversee fee collections and ensure TSA uses the funding properly.
Another option is to turn over passenger security to airports and other private entities.
Private security contracts, overseen by government regulators, are commonplace in many countries — and are already used at some US airports.
TSA has frequently embarrassed itself with security lapses, poor equipment choices and the padded personnel budgets that often accompany slapdash federal agency expansions.
Alternatively, Congress could repeal the Passenger Security Fee entirely and fund the forward-facing portion of TSA’s responsibilities only through general revenues.
That would at least give taxpaying travelers a break on ticket prices.
One final option: Congress could fulfill its 2013 and 2018 claims.
Change the name to the “Special Deficit Reduction Fee” and require the revenue to go directly to the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, to trim down the $39 trillion in borrowing our government has foisted on future generations of taxpayers.
It’s not particularly fair or logical to have air travelers help clean up Washington’s profligate spending habits — but at least it would be more honest than picking their pockets for something that doesn’t shorten airport security lines.
In fact, both the president’s Fiscal Year 2026 budget and bipartisan legislation in Congress called the SAFEGUARDS Act already propose to end the underhanded Passenger Security Fee diversion.
This is no longer about ICE enforcement, or immigration policy in general, or the separation of powers — it’s about our money.
Get to work, Washington.
Pete Sepp is president of National Taxpayers Union.