The Shutdown is a Reminder that Airports, the TSA, and ATC Should Be Privatized

When politics ground Washington, private enterprise keeps planes flying

I had to fly last week and again on Sunday. Like many people, I went to the airport worried that the TSA lines would be super long if TSA agents stayed home with the blue flu. That’s what government workers who have to work without pay during a government shutdown come down with to avoid unpaid shifts. I was very nicely surprised that, at least for my travels, TSA agents were there, flights kept taking off, passengers kept moving, and air-traffic controllers kept guiding planes through the skies.

This was also a reminder: America’s air infrastructure continues to function largely despite Washington, not because of it. That’s precisely why our airports—and their security—should be privatized. We agents would all be better off for it.

Economist Chris Edwards of the Cato Institute has long made this case, noting that the United States is an outlier among developed nations with its public airports. He writes:

“Policymakers can also look to Europe, which has embraced airport privatization since Margaret Thatcher privatized London’s Heathrow in 1987. Today half of Europe’s commercial airports are private, including the main airports in Antwerp, Birmingham, Brussels, Budapest, Copenhagen, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Lisbon, Liverpool, Naples, Rome, Vienna, and Zurich.”

Canada turned its airports over to private, nonprofit authorities in the 1990s; Britain privatized its major airports under the British Airports Authority in 1987; Australia, New Zealand, and much of Europe followed. The outcome of airport privatization was more investment, better management, and improved service quality across the board.

The contrast with the U.S. could not be sharper. American airports depend on Washington for approval of even basic capital projects. Their financing is entangled in the FAA’s Airport Improvement Program, a labyrinth of federal grants and restrictions that forces local managers to wait on political decisions before upgrading runways, terminals, or navigation systems. When Congress fails to pass a budget—as it did again this fall—airport projects stall. Private airports abroad don’t have that problem. They raise funds directly on capital markets and answer to passengers and airlines, not to legislators.

The irony is that a tax expenditure that Jack Salmon and I have argued should be eliminated is a reason why financing private airports is so much more expensive than financing government-owned ones. Edwards and Bob Pool explain:

“Why has the United States resisted the sort of airport restructuring that is occurring abroad?³⁶ One factor has been that state and local governments can issue tax-exempt bonds to finance public airports, but private airports would have to rely on taxable bonds. The result is that financing is less costly for establishing and expanding government-owned airports than private airports.”

We should end the exclusion of interest on state and local bonds. However, if that first base solution isn’t available, Edwards and Poole have argued that we should at least level the playing field by letting private airport projects tap the same tax-exempt financing tools that public ones already enjoy.

The same case for privatization applies to airport security. After 9/11, the creation of the Transportation Security Administration centralized screening under a single federal workforce of some 60,000 employees. That approach may have seemed necessary in 2001, but I disagreed even at the time; two decades later, it looks increasingly outdated.

The evidence also shows that private screeners working under federal standards outperform the TSA on efficiency and customer satisfaction. During the last shutdown in 2019, the Heritage Foundation’s David Inserra wrote about how San Francisco International Airport—which opted out of TSA screening and contracts privately under the Screening Partnership Program—consistently reports faster throughput and equal or better security outcomes than comparable federally staffed airports. It also had the added benefit of not being affected during the shutdown. Kansas City International, another participant, shows similar results.

Abroad, the private model is the norm. In Canada, the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority sets national standards but contracts private companies to perform screenings. Workers are paid competitively, turnover is lower, and accountability is clearer. Europe uses similar systems, with oversight by independent regulators rather than centralized bureaucracies. The result: a mix of competition and professionalism that protects safety while avoiding political disruption.

Edwards also has several good pieces about why Air traffic Control (ATC) should be privatized, as many other countries have done. There certainly is enormous space for reforms.

Privatization doesn’t mean abandoning oversight, but rather separating it from the operation. In aviation, this distinction is critical. The same government that regulates U.S. airports also runs many of them, an obvious conflict of interest that stifles innovation.

The federal shutdown simply underscored these realities. Every time Washington stalls, the nation’s aviation system is forced to prove that it can function without it. The lesson isn’t that we need a bigger federal role to “protect” essential services. It’s that essential services should be insulated from Washington’s dysfunction altogether.