National

They Published the Schedule, and Now They Are Running It

The airport chaos has a name, a document, a sequence, and a private contractor waiting at the end of it. The staffing shortage is the cover story, the scheduled transfer of public infrastructure to private hands is the mechanism, and the workers are the proof of concept.

Our Revolution Media

31 Mar 2026 — 10 min read

Photo by Engin Yapici / Unsplash

Part Two of a series on the deliberate dismantling of American aviation infrastructure. Part One covered how 45 years of deregulation and the destruction of PATCO built the conditions DOGE is now accelerating. This piece is about what comes next, and who already wrote it down.

There is a sentence buried in Chapter 5 of Project 2025 that reads like a memo written to the present moment.

"Until it is privatized, TSA should be treated as a national security provider, and its workforce should be deunionized immediately."

Note the word "until." Not "unless." Not "if Congress decides." Until. Privatization is the destination. Everything happening at airports right now, the 42-day funding lapse, the unpaid workers donating plasma to afford gas to get to jobs they are not being compensated for, the ICE agents moving into the spaces TSA officers are vacating, is the road being built toward it, on schedule.

The Blueprint

The Document

Project 2025 is 900 pages long, which is useful. Documents that long tend to get summarized into their most inflammatory lines and then dismissed as fringe. But Chapter 5, authored by Ken Cuccinelli, Trump's former Acting DHS Secretary, is not fringe. Its TSA section is written not as a proposal but as advance notice of a decision already made.

The language is unambiguous. TSA should be privatized. The workforce should be deunionized immediately. The existing Screening Partnership Program, which already allows private contractors to handle security at 21 airports under TSA supervision, should be expanded nationwide. The document does not hedge these recommendations or frame them as aspirational. It frames them as a checklist.

What makes the document useful to read in March 2026 is not that it predicted the future. It is that it described a sequence, and the sequence is being executed in order.

The Sequence

On February 27, 2025, Secretary Kristi Noem rescinded the collective bargaining agreement between AFGE and the TSA, a seven-year contract covering approximately 47,000 Transportation Security Officers at over 400 airports, claiming collective bargaining was "incompatible" with TSA's national security mission. AFGE and allied unions sued, arguing First Amendment retaliation, Fifth Amendment due process violations, and APA violations. In June 2025, U.S. District Judge Marsha Pechman granted a preliminary injunction, finding a strong likelihood of "impermissible retaliation." Noem issued a second termination determination in September. A second judge blocked that too, in January 2026. The administration has now attempted to strip the union twice, lost in court twice, and has not stopped.

Less than three weeks after Noem's first action, Senators Mike Lee and Tommy Tuberville introduced the Abolish TSA Act, which would privatize all airport security functions within three years of enactment and transfer them to private contractors under a new federal oversight office that, by the bill's own language, cannot conduct screening itself.

Strip the union. Then strip the agency. You do not privatize a unionized workforce if you can avoid it. You break the union first, then hand the contract to a private company whose workers you can pay less, fire more easily, and organize against far more difficulty. The sequence is the method.

The Prototype

Project 2025 envisions abolishing DHS entirely and consolidating TSA, ICE, CBP, and USCIS into a single immigration-focused enforcement structure, with everything else either privatized or eliminated. What is being built at airports right now is not a temporary workaround for a funding dispute. It is the prototype for that structure, running live, under pressure, in front of 50,000 workers who cannot afford to quit and cannot legally strike.

The acting TSA administrator, Ha Nguyen McNeill, testified before Congress this week that absence rates have reached 40 percent at some airports and that more than 480 officers have quit since the shutdown began in February. She warned of potential airport closures. She described workers donating plasma to make ends meet. None of that testimony changed the political calculus of the members who had already decided the workers were expendable. It was not supposed to.

The Replacement

The Funding Split

While TSA workers went without pay for 42 days, ICE and CBP continued operating normally, funded through separate appropriations that were never part of the shutdown calculus. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, passed by Republicans last summer, funneled $75 billion to ICE operations, ensuring the agency's funding is protected for years regardless of what happens to the rest of DHS. Congress allocated ICE billions while TSA screeners donated plasma to afford gas to get to jobs they were not being paid for.

When the political pressure from collapsing airports finally became untenable, Trump signed a presidential memorandum directing that TSA agents be paid, drawing from those same funds. The legal basis for that move is disputed. What is not disputed is that the administration found billions to protect immigration enforcement on day one and needed a manufactured crisis to locate emergency funds for the workers keeping planes in the air.

One enforcement apparatus was deliberately starved. Another was flush funded. The choice of which one was which was not made in February 2026. It was made in the budget bill passed last summer, and before that in the document published in 2023.

The Checkpoint

ICE officers were deployed to 14 airports, including Atlanta and JFK, to manage the staffing gaps created by the funding lapse. Officials said the agents would handle administrative tasks and queue management, not security screening. TSA union vice president Cameron Cochems described the deployment plainly: "It really feels like they're a Band-Aid over a gaping wound. Our officers, they're not getting paid, and having people that come in that are getting paid just feels like an insult."

What Cochems also said, and what the airport delay headlines did not carry, is that the ultimate goal of the Republican Party is to eliminate union protections and privatize the TSA. That is not a union official speculating. That is a union official reading the bill that sitting senators introduced eleven months ago and the 900-page document that preceded it.

ICE agents are not trained TSA screeners. They did not complete the minimum training that TSA certification requires. They are enforcement agents operating in civilian transit infrastructure during a manufactured moment of institutional weakness, a proof of concept, not a staffing solution.

The Labor Story Underneath

The story most outlets told was a logistics story: longer lines, frustrated travelers, staffing shortages, spring break chaos. The story underneath it is a labor story. Fifty thousand workers classified as essential, required to report without pay, legally prohibited from striking, and whose union the administration has attempted to dissolve twice in twelve months. The timing is not coincidence. You do not attempt to strip a workforce of its rights and then accidentally create the conditions under which those rights would have protected them most.

The private contractors are not hypothetical. The Screening Partnership Program has operated at 21 airports since 2004. The Abolish TSA Act would scale that model nationwide. Studies of SPP airports show lower wages, worse benefits, and higher turnover than TSA-staffed airports. The 2018 AFGE report found that across 10 major airports, TSA hired 8,553 officers between 2012 and 2016 while nearly as many, 7,784, left during the same period due to low pay, hazardous conditions, and the ongoing threat of privatization. That is the workforce model the blueprint is trying to recreate everywhere.

The Lineage

The Pattern

None of this is new. The tactic of defunding a public service until it fails, then offering privatization as the only available fix, has a documented history in American policy. It happened to public transit in dozens of cities across the mid-twentieth century, as federal highway subsidies outpaced transit investment until bus and rail systems became politically indefensible. It happened to public housing. It is happening now to public education through voucher programs that redirect funding before the public case for defunding is even made openly.

Naomi Klein named the pattern the shock doctrine: the exploitation of crisis, real or manufactured, to push through changes that would never survive a calm democratic debate. Project 2025's privatization agenda follows this logic with particular precision, targeting agencies that have accumulated public frustration and using that frustration as the justification for elimination. The shutdown did not create public frustration with TSA. It activated frustration that had been cultivated for years through the security theater critique, the shoe removal ritual, the long line imagery, all of it priming the public to receive "abolish TSA" as relief rather than as the elimination of 50,000 unionized federal jobs.

The Target

TSA is useful here because Americans have been culturally primed to dislike it. The long lines, the invasive pat-down procedures, the confiscated water bottles, all of it has generated a durable mild resentment that makes "abolish TSA" land differently than "abolish FEMA" or "abolish the Coast Guard" would. The Heritage Foundation did not choose this target randomly. They chose it because the public sentiment had already been shaped.

What gets lost in the frustration is what TSA actually is: a post-September 11 creation, built specifically because the atomized private screening system that existed before 2001 failed catastrophically. The private contractors running airport security on the morning of September 11 were operating under federal guidelines but without federal accountability, without federal training standards, and without the coordination that a centralized agency provides. Privatization is a return to that system, with the addition of a profit motive and the subtraction of collective bargaining rights.

The Return

The document was public. The votes are on record. The union was targeted by executive action twice and protected by federal courts twice. The defunding was structured into a budget bill months before the shutdown began. None of it was hidden. What is happening at airports this week was written down in 2023 by people who expected to be believed, and they were right to expect it.

The workers who showed up anyway, unpaid, because the alternative was losing everything, are not a staffing shortage statistic. They are the proof of concept. A workforce that cannot strike, cannot collectively bargain, and cannot afford not to show up is exactly the workforce the blueprint called for. The plasma donations are not a humanitarian crisis that caught anyone by surprise. They are evidence that the pressure is working as designed.

The only thing left on the checklist is the private contractor waiting to absorb the workforce at lower wages with fewer rights and no union to call. That contract has been in development since 2004. The airport is just where you can see it most clearly right now.

THE GAP

Each of the dominant frames, DOGE story, management failure, congressional standoff, misses the structural argument. This is a 45-year labor story, beginning with Reagan's destruction of PATCO in 1981, which signaled to every subsequent administration that aviation workers were essential but expendable, and accelerating through the structured defunding of the one agency that was never supposed to be a bargaining chip.

The executive order paying TSA workers this week was covered as a resolution. The Abolish TSA Act, introduced eleven months ago, describes exactly what comes next, in writing. The private contractors are not waiting in the wings. They have been operating at 21 airports since 2004 and are ready to scale. That story received almost no coverage this week.

ROOT

How we got here in 60 seconds:

1978: The Airline Deregulation Act removes federal control over routes and fares, beginning the consolidation of airline power and the erosion of aviation labor standards.

1981: Reagan fires 11,000 PATCO air traffic controllers, breaking their union and establishing the precedent that aviation workers are essential but expendable.

2001: The September 11 attacks expose catastrophic failures in private airport security screening. Congress creates TSA as a federal agency with federal training standards and federal accountability.

2004: The Screening Partnership Program is established, allowing private contractors to handle screening at select airports under TSA oversight.

2023: Project 2025 is published. Chapter 5 calls for TSA to be deunionized immediately and privatized. The language is not aspirational. It is a schedule.

February 27, 2025: DHS Secretary Kristi Noem terminates the collective bargaining agreement covering 47,000 TSA officers. AFGE sues. A federal court blocks the action in June.

March 27, 2025: Senators Lee and Tuberville introduce the Abolish TSA Act, calling for full privatization within three years of enactment.

September 2025: Noem issues a second termination determination, concealing it from TSA workers for three months. A second federal court blocks it in January 2026.

February 2026: DHS funding lapses. TSA workers begin working without pay. ICE, funded separately by the One Big Beautiful Bill, continues operating normally.

March 2026: Absence rates reach 40 percent at some airports. More than 480 officers quit. ICE agents deploy to 14 airports. The acting TSA administrator warns of potential airport closures.

March 27, 2026: Trump signs a presidential memorandum directing TSA pay from disputed funding sources. The House rejects the Senate deal. The structural question is unresolved.

WHO PROFITS

The Abolish TSA Act does not benefit travelers. Private contractors operating under the Screening Partnership Program have documented higher turnover, lower wages, and worse benefits than TSA-staffed airports. Returning to a privatized model does not shorten lines or improve security. It transfers the cost of security from the federal budget to the workers themselves, through lower pay, fewer rights, and the constant threat of contract termination.

The airlines and their private equity backers have spent 45 years absorbing deregulation's benefits while the federal government absorbed the infrastructure bill. When the infrastructure fails, passengers and workers pay. The industry collects the contract. What privatization produces is a transfer of public money to private contractors, lower labor costs absorbed as profit, and a workforce that is harder to organize, easier to replace, and cheaper to maintain.

The workers donating plasma this week to cover the cost of showing up to jobs they are not being paid for are not a regrettable side effect of a political standoff. They are the demonstration model. A workforce that cannot strike, cannot bargain, and cannot afford to walk away is the product the blueprint was designed to produce. Project 2025 called for it in 2023. The Abolish TSA Act introduced it in 2025. The shutdown stress-tested it in 2026. The private contractors have been watching the results.