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The people arriving on private jets have always bypassed these bureaucratic procedures. Brotherhood and equality.

The question itself feels like it calls for "Schoolhouse Rock" level basics about how the federal government works.

The federal government does not work like a private escrow account where a fee collected for X automatically goes to Y. Tax revenue comes in to the Treasury, and Congress decides what agencies are allowed to spend. So even if TSA screening is funded in part by a per-ticket user fee, TSA still does not get to just collect that money and use it directly. Congress has to authorize and appropriate it.

On a practical level, imagine the chaos if every federal department acted as its own tax collector and then set its own spending priorities. That is basically an argument for gutting Congress's oversight of TSA and treating it like an independent agency, just because Congress and the executive branch invented the modern shutdown in the 1980s.

Keep in mind shutdowns are a fairly new concept, that nearly no other country has. The US also didn't have it for most of its history. Congress could stop at any time it wanted.

If you scroll down on the page, it'll show that the user fees only offset ~20% of the overall security expenses.

In addition, most fees (including most of the TSA fee) collected by the US Federal government isn't earmarked - it just goes into the general fund.

More breakdown here: https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/23/us/tsa-funding-security-fees-...

The same article you linked has a chart that shows that actual expenses are around 4x the fees that are collected.

AFAIC there's no good reason for airport security to be a federal jobs program in the first place. The airports and/or their contractors are perfectly capable of operating x-ray machines and metal detectors on their own, and from what I understand are even still permitted to but all choose to let the government do it and pay for it.

What the fuck is the TSA even supposed to be doing? The 9/11 guys supposedly used box cutters. Does anybody seriously think you can't get a little blade like that onto an airplane in your carry on luggage? I bring double sided razor blades with every time I fly and they have never flagged it. And more importantly, does anybody actually believe you could still hijack a plane with a pocket knife? All the other passengers now know the score, they all die unless they throw themselves on you which they will and have done many times since. What's more, you won't get into the locked cockpit anyway. Airport security is solved. Basic bitch scanning for guns is all you need and we had that solved in the 90s which is the reason the hijackers used pocket knives, which no longer works. Disband the TSA.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say the 5.60 per person per flight doesn't cover the cost of TSA airport security operations leaving congress responsible for the gap.

If you are wondering how that could happen, it starts with no-bid contracts and ends with inefficiency and has been heavily influenced by a guy whose name sounds a lot like Schmical Schmertoff.

Because the fee revenue was created by congress, so the money goes 1/3 to Treasury to help pay national debt (doesn't really make a dent), about $1.6B goes to the government general fund. But FY24 collected $4.5B in fees, but the budget was almost $9.5B.

So even if all the money went to TSA, less than half their budget is covered. There is inherently bloat in that, but that is for a different discussion.

But bigger still, if Congress didn't reappropriate that money from TSA, they'd either have to spend less (less likely), raise taxes (not likely), or go deeper in debt (very likely) in order to cover whatever they are currently covering with their 70% share of the fee.

It’s an odd list of airports which contract their own security screeners. I’d bet a lot of places are going to consider joining that program:

https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/21/us/airports-without-tsa

I _just_ went though the line. It wasn't too bad (5-10min, despite having bio ID), but it was by far the worst I've encountered at SFO in the decade I've been flying out of there.

yeah SFO seems to be completely uneffected

buffers salaries?

I have been kind of experimenting with using single archive pages for archive.is /.ph/.today links and then experimenting with either putting these on my github pages (and then archiving) just for more preservation purposes.

Today I wanted to try something different so I used singlefile to make a html and then make pdf file from that html and uploaded it to archive.org

https://archive.org/details/tsa-lines-are-so-out-of-control-...

I don't wish to have news articles in my github as it clutters or I am not sure how these laws might follow (there is definitely a reason as to why archive.is creator is anonymous) and so I am looking for more anonymous ways to upload (my main intentions are that archive.ph can be nice but I feel like its not validated within wikipedia/all the controversies it has and I am just experimenting with things right now)

I have also uploaded this on catbox.moe (https://files.catbox.moe/mt9sus.html) but it has plain/text content-type, does anyone know a more anonymous content-type plain/text -> html where I can upload things perhaps, I have thoughts about creating something like this (where people can give links to text .html files and I can then display the html) but I am also a bit worried that it might be used for nefarious purposes.

I am not sure what I should do actually about it, I like thinking about archiving though, but anything other than archive.org like archive.is, can only function best if they are anonymous and I am not really anonymous/intend to be.

This makes me sympathetic of them against the journalist who tried to dox them but also I kind of understand that journalist tried approaching first from a more curiosity, maybe a threat-actor model, I had done something like this once to a service because I wanted to know if govt.'s would be able to catch them or not (they had a reddit proxy) and I found that they had their opsec secure and I was really impressed but I sometimes wonder, if the journalist also did something like this and the archive.is owner felt like it was a threat to archive and decided to ddos and all the things that followed, I sort of understand both the perspectives, so it just makes me sad as how this ended up folding up.

(This comment might've been more relevant within the archive.is drama hackernews thread but I think that its long gone and I was still forming my opinion on all of this which clearly has some nuance)

Doesn't this guy's server just DDoS some dude's blog with your own browser? Didn't click.

Some people are challenged by the choice whether to go without medication or food this week.

Fascinating. Is there something specific about those temples that draws the crowds, like something akin to a famous cathedral? Must worship take place in a temple? I don't know how the religion works but did get to visit a local temple once with some coworkers and enjoyed the atmosphere.

The reverse applies: if you protest against the regime, your TSA pre can be revoked. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...

If some of his minions gave him this idea he’d probably do it.

we already have this with TSA Pre

It’s really just a handful that have long lines part of the day. LAX for example hasn’t has a line at all really. Takes longer for my bag to be secondary checked every time than it does to wait in line.

That's why anecdotal evidence doesn't mean much.

I’ve heard this is very airport dependent

Essential Air Service travelers aren't seeing any major pain either traveling outbound. Fortunately (though kind of sadly) the TSA folks only work a couple hours a day at the checkpoint for the single flight in and out so most of them are working side jobs anyways as their day job from what I hear. Our checkpoint doesn't even open until ~45 minutes before boarding starts in the middle of the day.

Efficiency is when you make a problem and then make people pay you to solve it. Or maybe that was some other word, I forget.