Federal TSA agents all over the country are calling out sick, quitting their jobs, and literally donating plasma to keep the lights on — and meanwhile, one major airport is cruising along like nothing happened. That airport is in San Francisco. Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco. The city that can’t keep human feces off the sidewalk just became the best advertisement for free-market capitalism in the 21st century.
Ka-ching! Turns out all you have to do to make airport security work is stop letting the federal government run it.
TSA agents are calling out sick at rates that would get you fired from a Wendy’s. Unscheduled absences have more than doubled nationwide. JFK hit a 21% absence rate. Atlanta clocked in at 19%. And at Houston’s Hobby Airport — are you sitting down? — fully half the screening officers just didn’t show up. Fifty percent of the workforce decided they had better things to do than work for free. Like selling their blood plasma at $50 a pop to make rent.
Travelers at Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental are posting photos of security lines stretching across entire terminals. Four-hour waits. You stand in line for four hours so some poor guy in a blue polo shirt who hasn’t seen a paycheck in weeks can rummage through your carry-on looking for shampoo bottles that are 0.4 ounces over the limit. It’s like a scene from a Soviet airport, except the Soviets at least had the decency to be upfront about the misery.
Meanwhile, in Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco…
San Francisco International — one of the top 15 busiest airports in the country — is running like a Swiss watch. No chaos. No four-hour lines. No screeners hawking their blood products at the plasma center after their shift.
Why? Because SFO told the federal government’s Grope Patrol to take a hike back in 2002. They use a private company called Covenant Aviation Security instead. Private screeners. Same security rules. Same TSA oversight. Different paychecks. And wouldn’t you know it — the private ones actually showed up to work.
“The money’s already been allocated, the payments have already been made, and that continues without interruption,” said SFO spokesperson Doug Yakel, presumably sipping coffee and watching news footage of airport pandemonium everywhere else in America.
Must be nice, Doug.
Only about 20 of America’s roughly 400 commercial airports use private screeners. Twenty out of four hundred! The other 380 are stuck with federal employees — underpaid, overworked, and now walking off the job in droves because Congress can’t pass a budget without a nervous breakdown. TSA has lost more than 300 employees since the shutdown started, and replacing each one takes four to six months of training. (Your tax dollars at work training replacements for people who quit because your tax dollars weren’t paying them. You can’t make this stuff up.)
So naturally, the TSA union — the American Federation of Government Employees — had this to say about the SFO situation: “We will never advocate for any privatization of any federal employees. We don’t believe that’ll work.”
Doesn’t believe it’ll work! It’s working RIGHT NOW, genius. It’s working at SFO while your members are donating plasma and picking up shifts driving for Uber Eats. The private screeners at Pelosi International are clocking in, doing the job, and going home with full paychecks. Your members are facing eviction. But sure — privatization is the real threat here. These people are unbelievable.
Government employee unions exist for one reason and one reason only: to make sure government employees can never be fired, no matter how badly the system fails the rest of us. The TSA “union” would rather its members starve on the federal payroll than thrive on a private one. That tells you everything about whose interests they’re actually protecting. (Hint: not the screeners, and definitely not yours.)
Even the guy who BUILT TSA PreCheck says the private version works better. Sheldon Jacobson — he literally helped design the system — told reporters that the SFO model “is something that needs to be explored” at other airports. “If SFO is the litmus test for delivering this privatized product, then many other airports can do it, too.”
The man who helped build the machine is telling you the machine is broken. Maybe someone should pass that along to Congress before they lose another 300 employees.
But here’s where — hold on, let me stop laughing — here’s where it gets truly ridiculous. San Francisco. The city that spent $1.7 million on a single public toilet. The city where the Board of Supervisors once debated whether to give illegal aliens the right to vote in school board elections (they did it). THAT city accidentally became the national poster child for Reagan-style conservative economics. Nancy Pelosi’s own constituents are gliding through airport security on the wings of private enterprise while the rest of America rots in federal lines that wrap around the terminal twice.
I’ve been saying for years that the best arguments for conservatism come from watching liberal cities try to function. I did not expect the next exhibit to be “San Francisco’s airport works better because it rejected big government.” And yet here we are.
A couple of Republican senators introduced the “Abolish TSA Act” last year to phase out the agency entirely. CNN called it “dangerous.” The Washington Post editorial board nearly had a stroke. “Who will protect us from the terrorists?!” they wailed, clutching their pearls like Miss Havisham at an airport Chili’s.
Well, Covenant Aviation Security will, apparently. They’ve been doing it at SFO for over two decades. The government just ran the experiment for us — federal screeners on one side, private screeners on the other — and the private side won in a landslide while the federal side was busy donating plasma.
Privatize the whole thing. Every last airport. Nancy Pelosi deserves a thank-you card and we deserve to stop standing in line for four hours behind some guy who forgot to take his belt off.