TSA lines are so out of control that travelers are hiring line-sitters • Hacker News Board

Re: TSA lines are so out of control that travelers are hiring line-sitters

#151

Post by verall » Mon, Mar 30, 2026, 3:44 PM UTC

caminante wrote: post #129

verall wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not nearly enough jobs to be a jobs program

By what standard? Federal civilian workforce (ex Postal Service and Military) is only 3 million. TSA has 60k employees. That's a lot of permanent jobs.

By your own numbers - 60k employees just doesn't touch a jobs program in a country of 350M people. The point of a jobs program is to provide jobs.

TSA was created to accomplish a goal - security theater (mostly), preventing another 9/11 (maybe more in theory than in practice), etc.

The New Deal WPA, according to wikipedia, supplied about 3M jobs at its peak in 1938, when the population was ~130M.

2.3% of the population vs 0.017%.

Also empirically - if it was a jobs program, it would be way better staffed..

Re: TSA lines are so out of control that travelers are hiring line-sitters

#152

Post by bookofjoe » Mon, Mar 30, 2026, 4:30 PM UTC

gsibble wrote: post #148

bookofjoe wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hacker News Guidelines What to Submit On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html ....................... Nowhere does it say it must have to do with technology.

"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic." They've been covering all of this on TV news.

There's my problem: I don't watch TV news.

Re: TSA lines are so out of control that travelers are hiring line-sitters

#153

Post by caminante » Mon, Mar 30, 2026, 11:54 PM UTC

verall wrote: post #151

caminante wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By what standard? Federal civilian workforce (ex Postal Service and Military) is only 3 million. TSA has 60k employees. That's a lot of permanent jobs.

By your own numbers - 60k employees just doesn't touch a jobs program in a country of 350M people. The point of a jobs program is to provide jobs. TSA was created to accomplish a goal - security theater (mostly), preventing another 9/11 (maybe more in theory than in practice), etc. The New Deal WPA, according to wikipedia, supplied about 3M jobs at its peak in 1938, when the population was ~130M. 2.3% of the populati…

>if it was a jobs program, it would be way better staffed..

You're saying it's not comparable to the size of the New Deal, the biggest jobs program ever in the US.

That doesn't disqualify it from consideration as a jobs program as there are many jobs programs much smaller.

Adding 60k to ~3 million is significant because it's permanent. These are low skilled workers (and security theater as you astutely say) mostly concentrated in large cities.

Whereas the New Deal was temp jobs that disappeared once grants and funding disappeared.

Re: TSA lines are so out of control that travelers are hiring line-sitters

#154

Post by ranger_danger » Tue, Mar 31, 2026, 12:04 AM UTC

joquarky wrote: post #107

kgermino wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the TSA wouldn’t do anything to stop that Hell the TSA doesn’t do much to prevent that on commercial flights, but requiring private flights to start going through commercial security would be completely pointless

Inconveniencing wealthy people might create motivation to fix the problem.

Even if you're flying commercial, wealthy people can just pay Perq Soleil $250 a pop to waltz them through the employee line with no wait.

Re: TSA lines are so out of control that travelers are hiring line-sitters

#155

Post by AVA_Travel » Thu, Apr 02, 2026, 4:38 AM UTC

The TSA experience is a big reason why some international travelers actively avoid US layovers. I've talked to people who book longer routes through Europe or Asia just to skip US airport security theater.

It's interesting that the market solution is hiring line-sitters rather than, say, pressure on TSA to improve throughput. Says a lot about how normalized the dysfunction has become.