The New Yorker:

T.S.A. workers protect America’s transportation systems. Now their own protections are being stripped away.

By E. Tammy Kim

When Juan joined the Transportation Security Administration, or T.S.A., about seven years ago, he wasn’t sure how long he could afford to stay. He was assigned to staff the screening checkpoint and inspect bags at Palm Springs International Airport, an indoor-outdoor facility at the foot of the San Jacinto Mountains, a few hours’ drive east of Los Angeles. He had thought that any position within the federal government would provide stability and a living wage, but he was given only part-time hours. His pay was so low that he had to live with his parents and work a second job. His supervisors seemed eager to write him up for small mistakes. All that grief just “to be a meat shield,” he said. He was trained on the floor in Palm Springs and at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in southeastern Georgia, alongside Border Patrol agents, corrections officers, and F.B.I. officers. Even there, the T.S.A. was something of an “ugly-stepchild agency,” Juan, whose real name I’ve withheld for privacy, told me.

Juan was a young child when the T.S.A. was created as part of the George W. Bush Administration’s panicked response to 9/11. By autumn of 2002, some fifty-five thousand transportation security officers, or T.S.O.s, were screening airplane passengers for the T.S.A. They began as private contractors but were soon converted to federal employees, and, in 2003, the T.S.A. was absorbed by the Department of Homeland Security. It’s easy to hate the agency for making air travel inconvenient. At recent “Hands Off!” protests against Elon Musk’s dogeand in support of federal workers, I’ve yet to spot a sign paying tribute to the T.S.A. And yet, in 2023, for instance, T.S.O.s intercepted nearly seven thousand firearms, ninety-three per cent of which were loaded. Juan believed that prevention, a lack of big news, was proof of success. He often thought about Richard Reid, who had tried to detonate a “shoe bomb” midair, a few months after 9/11. The subsequent removal and screening of shoes has stopped someone from “trying that same exact thing again,” Juan said.

Go to link