The policy is titled “Eliminating Collective Bargaining at TSA Due to its Incompatibility with TSA’s National Security Mission and its Adverse Impact on Resources, Flexibility, Mission Focus, Security Effectiveness, and Traveler Experience.”
That sentence is designed to make your eyes glaze over, to pass for administrative housekeeping rather than the dismantling of worker power for 47,000 people. Every word of it is intentional. On December 12, just as most Americans were turning their attention to the holidays, DHS finally revealed that a determination signed back in September would take effect on January 11, 2026. For nearly three months, they had sat on the decision.
Just thirty days earlier, agency leadership had celebrated TSA officers for their dedication during the longest government shutdown in history. In response to the announcement, AFGE National President Everett Kelley called it “a lump of coal right on time for the holidays,” words that barely registered in mainstream media. A handful of outlets covered the story that week, but within days it had vanished from the news cycle entirely.
When the new policy takes effect, TSA officers at 400 airports across the country will lose their collective bargaining agreement, grievance procedures, ability to negotiate working conditions, and the payroll deduction system that funds the union. In exchange, management will gain unilateral control over scheduling, assignments, and discipline.
Without a dramatic confrontation on the evening news, worker rights are eroding through obscure determinations and revised policies written in language so tedious that most people never read them. Even those who do struggle to understand what any of it means for their lives. The announcement never uses the phrase “stripping workers of their rights,” opting instead for “labor framework” and casting the elimination of protections as an upgrade or optimization. By the time most workers grasp what’s happening, the mechanisms for fighting back will already be gone.
Flexibility Without Recourse
In its public statements, DHS frames the elimination of collective bargaining as a gain in “flexibility,” a word that does a lot of work to make one-sided power sound mutual.
Under the 2024 collective bargaining agreement, TSA officers could file grievances and pursue arbitration to challenge unfair discipline, negotiate scheduling rules that prevented management from forcing them onto new shifts without notice, and access protections that made retaliation for raising concerns more difficult.
Without the agreement, TSA officers work at the pleasure of management, with no independent avenue to challenge an unfair write-up, no recourse when a schedule change arrives with 24 hours notice, and no options beyond uprooting their lives or resigning when transferred to an airport 500 miles away.
Congressional hearings have confirmed that TSA employees who report safety concerns are reassigned to airports hundreds of miles from their families, a quiet form of punishment that forces resignation without the paper trail of a termination. “They knew they couldn’t fire me,” one whistleblower recalled. “They were hoping that the relocation would make me quit.”
The collective bargaining agreement was the only thing standing between TSA officers and a workplace where retaliation carries no consequences.
The Evidence Undercutting the Claim
The administration’s case for eliminating collective bargaining is that union activity distracts TSA officers from their security mission. By their accounting, the agency has spent $7.2 million on “official time” for union work, 17,000 hours of management time on collective bargaining, and months on arbitration cases that drag on without resolution. In other words, the TSA would run better without all this labor relations overhead.
What the argument conveniently omits is how the TSA functioned before collective bargaining.
Before gaining union representation, the agency ranked dead last among 410 federal agency subcomponents in employee pay satisfaction. Attrition rates hovered around 19 to 20 percent, with workers leaving for comparable wages in fast food and construction. According to a DHS Inspector General report, the agency was hemorrhaging millions in recruiting and training costs while seasoned staff walked out the door. Compared to what TSA was spending to constantly replace its own workforce, the $7.2 million spent on union representation is a rounding error.
With the expansion of collective bargaining rights in 2022 and pay equity in 2023, this trajectory reversed. Average pay rose from $42,310 in 2019 to $61,840 in 2024. Over the same period, attrition dropped from 15.7 percent to 7.8 percent, and job satisfaction scores jumped 12.3 points in a single year, reaching the highest retention rate in agency history. “Since having a contract, we’ve seen a more stable workforce,” AFGE Council 100 President Hydrick Thomas observed, “and there has never been another aviation-related attack on our country.”
But despite the evidence in the union’s favor, the determination that eliminates TSA officers’ bargaining rights offers no explanation for how doing so will make airports safer or more efficient. What it does offer is a means for stripping rights from other workplaces using the same ambiguous justification.
The Privatization Endgame
Eliminating collective bargaining is only step one. In April, lawmakers introduced the Abolish the TSA Act, which would dissolve the agency by 2028 and hand airport security to private contractors. During testimony in May, Acting TSA Administrator Ha McNeill stated that “nothing is off the table” regarding privatization. With the groundwork already laid, once the workforce loses its protections, attrition will rise. Then when the agency starts struggling again, lawmakers can present privatization as the only viable solution.
Before TSA existed, screening was handled by private contractors hired by airlines, with contracts awarded to the lowest bidder. Screeners made as little as $6 an hour, and at some airports, turnover exceeded 400 percent annually. Workers who have experienced both systems describe the difference unfavorably. “The same companies that failed us on 9/11 are now under different names,” AFGE has warned, “and are looking to get a share of the profitable pie.”
Executive orders this year have already stripped bargaining rights from two-thirds of the federal workforce using the same national security justification. Healthcare workers at the VA, EPA employees, prison workers, and anyone whose job can be classified as essential to public safety now has reason to wonder whether their contract is worth the paper it’s printed on. The TSA case proves that a seven-year contract, ratified by tens of thousands of workers, can be nullified with a single memo. If this stands, it sets an alarming precedent for employers across the country to replicate. With a justification broad enough to cover nearly any workforce deemed essential, employers can use the mechanism relentlessly.
After the Contract Is Gone
Starting January 11, TSA officers will lose union representation at disciplinary meetings, grievance procedures to challenge unfair treatment, and shields against management payback for speaking up about safety. AFGE has filed an emergency motion to enforce an injunction that blocked the first attempt to terminate the contract, and the courts have scheduled the case for trial in September. In the meantime, the agency promised that internal policies will address employee concerns.
For workers outside the federal government, where only 6% of private sector employees belong to unions and employers already spend $433 million annually on union avoidance consultants, the nation’s largest employer just redefined how employers can demolish a union contract without blowback. “I think that what he’s doing, he is using the federal sector as a test case,” AFGE President Everett Kelley told CNN. “We know the playbook. And corporations are watching.”
When the new framework takes effect, TSA officers will show up to work at airports across the country, and everything will look exactly the same: the checkpoints, the uniforms, and all the lines of passengers waiting to be screened. But the contract that gave them a voice will be gone, replaced by a ‘labor framework’ most of them never had a chance to read. Unless you were paying very close attention, you wouldn’t know anything had changed at all.
Reporting Note
This article is based on analysis of primary government documents, union statements, federal oversight reports, court filings, and contemporaneous media coverage concerning the Department of Homeland Security’s decision to terminate collective bargaining rights for Transportation Security Administration officers. Sources include TSA and DHS policy determinations, AFGE communications, congressional hearing records, Inspector General findings, and labor market data. Quoted statements are drawn from public testimony and verified reporting across established news outlets.
