By Ending Contract, Union Officials Claim, Trump Administration Violated 'Dignity and Rights' of TSA Agents

The Department of Homeland Security unilaterally tore up a collective bargaining agreement it had signed with unionized TSA screeners in May 2024.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced on Friday that it will no longer honor a collective bargaining agreement with the unionized employees of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), citing a persistence of low-performing workers and excess resources being spent on union activity.

"Transportation Security Officers will no longer lose their hard-earned dollars to a union that does not represent them," said DHS in a statement. "This action will ensure Americans will have a more effective and modernized workforces across the nation's transportation networks."

Democrats and union officials are outraged, saying that by unilaterally canceling a signed labor agreement, DHS is violating the rights of TSA workers and putting the efficiency of airport security screenings at risk.

"This administration is undermining their rights, which will mean fewer officers, longer airport screening lines, and a greater threat to public safety and national security," said Sen. Brian Schatz (D–Hawaii), the co-author of a perennial bill to increase TSA worker protections, in an emailed statement.

Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE)(which represents TSA screeners), said the union "will not rest until the basic dignity and rights of the workers at TSA are acknowledged by the government once again."

The complaint that the dignity and rights of TSA screeners are being violated is a little rich, given how the agency's screeners treat the flying public.

Nevertheless, DHS's action does violate the plain terms of a collective bargaining agreement signed by AFGE and TSA in May 2024. That contract specifies that it is to last for seven years and can only be partially renegotiated at the halfway point.

AFGE has already sued the Trump administration over a number of its executive orders affecting the federal workforce. A union official representing TSA screeners told The Wall Street Journal the latest DHS action is against the law.

The May 2024 collective bargaining agreement was a huge win for TSA unionized employees.

The new contract "greatly expanded" official time, whereby TSA employees get paid by the government to do union-related work. DHS singled out this benefit in its Friday press release, noting that 200 TSA employees work full-time on union matters.

The May 2024 contract was the latest in a long series of benefits awarded to TSA workers during the Biden administration. In 2021, the administration gave agency employees full collective bargaining rights. The 2023 omnibus funding bill passed by Congress included money for a 31 percent pay increase for TSA workers.

For the first half of its history, TSA workers were not unionized. It wasn't until 2011 that the Obama administration granted agency employees the right to unionize. The first TSA labor contract went into effect in late 2012.

The unionization of airport screeners realized the fear of many early TSA critics that the agency's security services would become "just another government jobs program," says Marc Scribner, a transportation researcher with Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes Reason.

Pay increases and union protections have made airport security needlessly expensive, and the process for eliminating bad employees is unnecessarily cumbersome, he tells Reason. Having the same agency both regulate airport security and provide airport security services is an inherent conflict of interest.

In Reason's recent 'Abolish Everything' issue, Robby Soave argued for eliminating the agency entirely.

In the service of largely ineffective security theater, "TSA agents riffle through luggage in search of contraband items and subject travelers to aggressive pat-downs of their genitals," he writes. "Navigating these intrusive procedures often requires showing up to the airport much earlier than would otherwise be necessary, creating inefficiencies for the airlines and their customers.

Scribner suggests a more modest reform program could involve leaving the TSA as a regulator of airport security while contracting out the actual services to private providers.

That kind of substantial reform to TSA will likely require more than a press release from DHS.