This holiday season, approximately 18 million Americans are relying on the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to ensure their safety during air travel.
What many travelers might not be aware of is that a significant portion of TSA personnel have been diverted from their primary duties due to union responsibilities, potentially leading to inefficiencies and increased costs for taxpayers.
In a significant shift, the Trump administration is set to address this issue.
Beginning in January, the more than 47,000 officers at the TSA will no longer be bound by the collective bargaining agreement instituted during Joe Biden’s tenure, which has been seen as a distraction from the agency’s crucial security mission.
This month, the Department of Homeland Security announced plans to revert to the TSA’s original employment framework by terminating the collective bargaining deal.
Secretary Kristi Noem justified this decision, stating in a September memo that collective bargaining is “not compatible with ensuring that the Agency maintains the maximum agility required to secure the traveling public from constantly evolving threats.”
This incompatibility was widely understood when the TSA was first created in the early 2000s.
Bipartisan majorities in Congress gave the agency flexibility, and so, much like the military, FBI and many other national-security parts of government, it was not made subject to collective bargaining.
President Barack Obama eventually opened the door to partial unionization at TSA, but collective bargaining was limited.
Yet President Joe Biden expanded bargaining dramatically, and as Noem has now painstakingly documented, itâs wasting taxpayer money and weakening the TSAâs ability to fulfill its mission.
Just consider how much time TSA leaders spend dealing with collective bargaining instead of focusing on public safety.
The 2016 limited collective-bargaining process alone required over 17,000 hours of management time.
Contract negotiations cost hundreds of thousands of dollars every few years. In 2019, the TSA spent nearly $400,000 on negotiators for both sides.
Under the agreement, Americans pay for TSA employees to work for the union, work that isnât necessarily about protecting the American people from threats in the skies.
In 2024, the agency spent more than $7.2 million on workers who focused solely on union-related matters â a labor handout known as âofficial time.â
And since 2012, the union has filed 1,200 arbitration cases, costing taxpayers more than $850,000 in legal fees and other services alone.
Some arbitrations have lasted more than a year and involved nationwide matters. The most recent took 19 months, nearly 7,000 attorney hours and nearly a month of senior managementâs combined time.
The secretaryâs letter relates serious concerns of TSA leaders, including from career security directors who reported spending less time on security and management because they had to deal with arbitration matters.
The Department of Homeland Security even found that, after last yearâs TSA collective bargaining agreement went into effect, unscheduled absences by officers jumped by nearly a quarter.
These absences harm TSAâs ability to fulfill its mission.
Major airports in Atlanta and Phoenix struggled to staff their security teams. At Phoenix, 10% of workers didnât show up on the average day last December.
But when collective bargaining wasnât in effect, unexpected absences fell by more than half.
These facts led Noem to write that the leave provisions of the most recent collective-bargaining agreement âundermine mission readiness.â
The TSA is far from alone.
A recent report from my colleagues at the Institute for the American Worker shows collective bargaining at assorted federal agencies involve such pressing issues as the height of cubicle desk panels, smoking areas in tobacco-free federal properties and the right to wear sweatpants and spandex in federal offices.
At the Department of Veterans Affairs, taxpayers foot the bill for a labor union to occupy half a hospital wing.
Across the federal government last year, federal employees spent more than 3.2 million hours doing union work instead of their jobs â jobs that taxpayers fund, with the expectation that it serves the public interest.
Secretary Noemâs decision to refocus the TSA on security is praiseworthy.
When she issued an earlier version of this policy in March, the union that represents TSA officers convinced a federal judge to block it, and the union has already said it will sue again.
But the Trump administration is doing right by Americans.
They expect the federal government to protect us, and come January, the Transportation Security Administration will be even more focused on keeping our families and country safe.
Jonathan Wolfson is a visiting fellow at the Institute for the American Worker and led the policy office at the US Department of Labor from 2019-2021.
