Twenty-five years after 9/11, the Trump administration is quietly selling off the security system Congress built to prevent it from happening again.

"Somebody's forgetting."

— Hydrick Thomas, AFGE TSA Council 100 President, on who is remembering what 9/11 taught

The morning of September 11, 2001, the men who hijacked four airplanes walked box cutters and knives through airport security checkpoints operated by private contractors. Companies like Argenbright Security, Globe Security, and Huntleigh USA managed the screening for individual airports, which gave contracts to whoever bid the lowest. The extra checks they did perform were, in the words of the 9/11 Commission, "marginal at best."

Two months later, President George W. Bush signed the Aviation and Transportation Security Act, creating the Transportation Security Administration and federalizing airport security for the first time. He called it "permanent and aggressive."

Now, on the eve of the 25th anniversary of those attacks, the Trump administration is editing "permanent" right out of the definition.

The public only learned about the TSA Gold+ privatization program by accident. Someone found a TSA-branded briefing flyer at Orlando International Airport, handed it to a reporter at Federal News Network, and the story broke. The American Federation of Government Employees says the program had been in development since at least August 2025 and was being marketed to corporations behind closed doors.

Under Gold+, private contractors will take over not just passenger screening at participating airports, but the actual machines that scan people and baggage for weapons and explosives. Three airports have already signed up: Charleston, South Carolina; Des Moines, Iowa; and Tampa, Florida. Tampa says contractors will be selected by September and security will be fully privatized by May 2027.

The program comes with a budget of nearly $13 billion.

Translation: the government is essentially selling its screening equipment to private companies, then paying those companies to run it. Revolving Door Project Executive Director Jeff Hauser compared it to the Pentagon buying F-35 jets, handing them to a defense contractor, then renting them back. Every additional transfer of money creates more opportunity for private profit.

AFGE filed suit against the federal government late Wednesday night, accusing TSA of developing and promoting the plan in total secrecy. The union says TSA failed to respond to a Freedom of Information Act request filed in May seeking basic information about the program, and instead threatened the union with a $25 processing fee.

Then TSA took what the lawsuit calls "yet more secretive actions": announcing the program to workers at Tampa and Des Moines airports on July 20, telling them they would either "accept employment with the private screening company once selected" or be reassigned, pursue another federal job, or retire.

The suit also reveals that a month after the Federal News Network story broke, the Trump administration held a secret "industry day" on May 21 at TSA headquarters in Springfield, Virginia. Hundreds of corporate representatives attended, including people from Palantir, Amazon, American Airlines, and United. Airport representatives from Baltimore, Philadelphia, Seattle, and JFK were there too. The union was not invited.

"It is a shame that TSA continues to operate in secrecy over their unnecessary privatization plans that will put the safety of the flying public in jeopardy," an AFGE spokesperson said. "We learned of this secret industry day after the fact."

The government's own procurement records show who was in that room. The public did not.

The preapproved list of companies that can bid on Gold+ contracts reads like a rogues' gallery of military contractors. Some also have active contracts with ICE, raising the prospect that passenger information flowing through airport screening systems could be shared as part of Trump's mass deportation campaign.

But according to security industry sources and federal contracting experts, the primary motivation predates deportations. These companies have wanted a piece of TSA ever since 9/11.

The federal government began ceding control almost immediately after creating the TSA. The Screening Partnership Program launched in 2004, just three years after federalization. Twenty airports use it now; the Trump administration's budget proposal would force approximately 220 small and non-hub airports to join.

The private security industry has been lobbying for this moment for a quarter century.

The human cost is already visible. The proposed fiscal year 2027 budget would eliminate 8,400 TSA officer positions, about 14 percent of the workforce. A little over half would be replaced with contracted workers, meaning roughly 4,200 jobs simply disappear.

Hydrick Thomas, president of AFGE TSA Council 100, told The American Prospect he has personally witnessed the sloppy practices of private security contractors at airports. Baggage handlers skipping checkpoints to board vacation flights. Background checks treated as paperwork exercises rather than actual vetting.

The history supports his concern. Argenbright Security, one of the companies that ran airport security before 9/11, employed criminals as screeners. After the attacks, the company let a man with knives and a stun gun through O'Hare. The government fined Argenbright $1 million and sentenced an executive to prison for falsely certifying that 1,300 employees had been properly trained and checked.

Even the most heralded private security operation has cracked. At San Francisco International Airport, where taxpayers have spent approximately $1.5 billion on Covenant Aviation Security, the FBI found that some of Covenant's personnel helped smugglers traffic cocaine by allowing them to bypass x-ray screening between 2013 and 2014.

Since the TSA federalized airport security in 2001, there has been zero planes hijacked on American soil.

Sara Nelson, international president of the Association of Flight Attendants, says the privatization effort is part of a broader project to dismantle government institutions and worker rights. She referenced the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 blueprint, which explicitly called for privatizing aviation screening.

"The federal government could expect to save 15 percent to 20 percent from the existing aviation screening budget, but savings could be significantly larger," wrote Ken Cuccinelli, a homeland security official in Trump's first term and author of the Project 2025 homeland security chapter.

Nelson compared the current strategy to the government shutdown of 2018, when the administration made the system fail on purpose so people would beg for alternatives. "They're trying to make the system not work so that people beg for something else," she said.

TSA workers forced to work without pay during the government shutdown earlier this year had to turn to food banks to survive.

The lawsuit gives the administration until August 14 to produce all wrongfully withheld documents. TSA has not commented.

On the morning of September 11, the contractors running airport security did their best with the lowest bids and the weakest oversight the system allowed. Congress responded by making security permanent and federally controlled. The result was two and a half decades without a single domestic hijacking.

The Trump administration is calling that result temporary, and selling the machines back to the companies whose ancestors failed.