TSA PreCheck Is a Scam Dressed Up as Convenience

The Toll Booth Nobody Asked For

My husband and I flew out of Dallas last Thanksgiving. Two kids, four bags, and the full TSA experience — shoes off, laptops out, baby formula flagged, a toddler patted down while a supervisor watched from fifteen feet away doing absolutely nothing. We'd forgotten to renew our PreCheck membership. That lapse cost us forty-five minutes we'll never get back.

That memory came roaring back last week when TSA PreCheck hit Google's trending searches again — apparently a wave of travelers just discovered the program exists, or just discovered it expired, or just discovered that $85 doesn't actually guarantee you the fast lane anymore. Crowded PreCheck lines are now a regular complaint at major airports. The thing sold as a solution has become its own problem.

Let's call this what it is. PreCheck isn't a security program. It's a tiered access scheme. You pay the government to treat you like a human being instead of a suspect.

The Original Promise Was Already Broken

The Transportation Security Administration was created in November 2001, six weeks after 9/11, in a panic. Congress nationalized airport security overnight. The agency has grown to roughly 60,000 employees, consumes about $9 billion annually, and has a documented failure rate on its own red team tests that would get a private contractor fired on the spot. In 2015, the Department of Homeland Security's own inspector general found TSA missed 95% of weapons and explosives smuggled through checkpoints during covert testing.

Ninety-five percent.

So the foundation of this entire system — the premise that TSA makes you safer — is shaky at best. And on top of that shaky foundation, they built a paywall. PreCheck launched broadly in 2013. For $85 every five years, you get expedited screening. You keep your shoes on. You keep your laptop in your bag. You're presumed not to be a terrorist.

Which raises the obvious question: why are the other passengers presumed to be terrorists?

Who Gets Treated Like a Citizen

The answer, as usual, follows the money. PreCheck has enrolled over 15 million members as of 2024. At $85 a pop, that's a significant revenue stream for TSA and its enrollment partners. Global Entry, which covers international travel and includes PreCheck, runs $100 for five years. CLEAR, the private biometric fast lane that works alongside PreCheck, charges $189 annually. Stack them all and a frequent flyer might spend $300+ just to exercise the right to board a plane without being treated like a criminal.

Working families can't afford that. A single mom flying home for Christmas doesn't budget $85 for government fast passes. A veteran on a fixed income isn't paying for Global Entry. A truck driver taking his first vacation in three years isn't navigating a five-step enrollment process and a background check appointment at a regional enrollment center.

They get the full treatment. Shoes off. Arms up. Random selection for enhanced screening that is neither random nor enhanced in any meaningful way.

This is the dirty secret of PreCheck: it doesn't make anyone safer. It just sorts Americans into those who paid for dignity and those who didn't.

The Conservative Case Against This System

Conservatives used to be suspicious of government bureaucracies that charge citizens for basic services. We used to be the ones pointing out that when government creates a problem and then sells you the solution, something has gone deeply wrong.

TSA is a textbook case. The government took over airport security, made it worse, then created a subscription service to partially restore what air travel used to look like before they nationalized it. You're not buying faster service. You're buying back a piece of the experience that existed before TSA existed.

There's a philosophical rot in accepting that arrangement. When conservatives sign up for PreCheck without complaint, we're implicitly endorsing the premise — that the government owns the default and we should be grateful for exceptions. That's backwards. The government works for us. The burden of proof is on the state to justify why air travel became an ordeal, not on citizens to pay for relief from it.

Privatize the whole thing. Israel's Ben Gurion Airport handles security through a combination of behavioral profiling, private contractors, and actually trained personnel. Their failure rate is not 95%. Their passengers don't remove their shoes. Their security lines don't need a $85 bypass lane because the underlying system actually functions.

The existence of PreCheck is an admission of failure. Every frequent flyer who signs up and says nothing about the two-tier system is funding that failure and calling it a deal.