TPA Backs Off Privatizing Airport Security, Keeping 800 Federal TSA Jobs

Tampa International Airport will keep its security checkpoints staffed by federal TSA officers, airport officials announced Monday, Aug. 24, abandoning a privatization plan it had signed onto barely a month earlier. The decision keeps roughly 800 local jobs in the federal workforce and means the screening line every Tampa Bay family stands in before a flight stays as it is.

Under the TSA's Gold+ model, a private company would have run screening operations and owned the checkpoint equipment, with the TSA supervising. Officers at TPA would have stopped being federal employees. They would have had three options: sign on with the contractor, take an early retirement package if they qualified, or find a federal TSA job at another airport.

Airport chief operating officer John Tiliacos said the deciding factor was technology. Officials could not get satisfying answers about how new screening equipment would be acquired and deployed under the private model, and that gap drove the choice to opt out.

The airport had opted in during July, becoming one of the first in the country to do so, and framed it at the time as a way to learn the details before committing. Its stated goals were blunt: insulate checkpoints from future government shutdowns, get newer screening technology faster, and improve the trip through the terminal. After several months of review covering security, workforce, technology, financial and legal questions, the answer was no.

Why shutdowns were the original argument

The case for going private rested largely on federal budget fights. When Congress deadlocks and funding freezes, TSA officers are still required to report to work but do not get paid until it ends. TPA officers have worked through exactly that.

CEO Michael Stephens, in announcing the reversal, thanked the airport's TSA team for working through record passenger growth, severe weather, federal funding disruptions and peak travel periods, and said the airport looks forward to continuing that partnership.

Five weeks of pushback

The plan drew opposition almost immediately. U.S. Rep. Kathy Castor wrote to Stephens and Hillsborough County Aviation Authority Chair Chip Diehl on Aug. 4, urging them to reject Gold+. Her letter said more than 700 Transportation Security Officers at TPA screen about 70,000 passengers a day, that many are veterans and long-serving employees, and that the switch put their pay, health coverage, earned retirement and accrued vacation at risk. She also argued handing checkpoint technology to a for-profit contractor exposed travelers' personal data.

Castor disputed the technology rationale directly, pointing to funding Congress had already authorized for TSA screening equipment.

A week later, the officers' union went to federal court. The American Federation of Government Employees sued the TSA seeking records on the timing and reasoning behind Gold+, and rejected the idea that privatization was the fix for funding freezes, citing a bill in Congress that would lock in TSA money years in advance.

TSA officers at TPA found out early Monday morning, in a message from agency management that acknowledged the previous month had been an uncertain stretch for the workforce and promised further updates. The union's national president welcomed the outcome and said he hoped other airports weighing privatization would make the same call.

Gold+ itself is now gone

The same day TPA opted out, the TSA announced it is scrapping Gold+ entirely. The agency says it will instead expand its existing Screening Partnership Program, the arrangement already used at 20 commercial airports nationwide, including Sarasota Bradenton International. Gold+ never gained traction: only three airports signed up.

Charleston International and Des Moines International were the other two. Neither had said what it will do as of Monday afternoon.

What that leaves unsettled is whether the TSA comes back to TPA with a different privatization pitch under the revamped Screening Partnership Program, which the agency has folded into a broader strategy it plans to discuss with staff in September. The union's lawsuit over the Gold+ records is still live. The airport's own statement announcing the reversal is posted on TPA's newsroom page.

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Header photo: Don Miller from Venice, United States / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)