1. United States
2. Texas
3. Letter

I’m writing to demand that you oppose any effort to privatize the TSA. As of today, March 27, the DHS shutdown has lasted 42 days. More than 510 TSA officers have quit. Sixty-one thousand are working without pay, having missed over $1 billion in wages. Call-out rates hit 55% at Houston Hobby and topped 40% at other airports. The House just rejected the Senate’s bipartisan funding bill. Meanwhile, the “Abolish the TSA Act” from Senators Lee and Tuberville would hand airport security to private contractors within 90 days. Project 2025 laid this out explicitly on page 159: de-unionize TSA, then privatize it. DHS Secretary Noem stripped collective bargaining from 50,000 TSA workers in March 2025. Every step has followed that sequence. History matters here. Economist Germà Bel’s peer-reviewed research documented that Nazi Germany was the only Western state to systematically privatize public services in the 1930s. The word “privatization” was coined to describe that policy. The Nazis destroyed labor unions first. Project 2025 follows the same order: crush the union, starve the agency, let it fail publicly, then hand it to private interests answerable to no one. Political scientists at Cornell and the Varieties of Democracy Project have flagged Project 2025’s institutional dismantling as matching authoritarian patterns in Hungary, Turkey, and Poland. Congress created the TSA after September 11 because privatized airport security failed and 3,000 people died. Since federalization, there has not been another attack of that scale. Vote against the Abolish the TSA Act. Fund DHS fully. Restore collective bargaining for federal security workers. Airport security should answer to the American public, not shareholders. Republicans and Democrats both fly commercial. Everyone’s family goes through those lines.