> There is an official way for travelers to bypass long TSA waits if they’re willing to spend: hiring concierge services to escort them through security.

> Perq Soleil is an airport arrival and departure assistance service that can help travelers through TSA in about a minute flat by accessing alternative lines usually reserved for airport staff and airline personnel. The company — which operates in more than 300 airports and 150 countries — charges a base rate that varies by location.

Talk about burying the lede. Apparently the airports “highly discourage” line-sitters, but if you use services that pre-bribed airports you can skip the lines entirely.

Private planes are just as capable of crashing into buildings as commercial jets. The TSA has picked up some ancillary public safety functions over the years, but their raison d'etre is to prevent hijackings.

Little planes, like this one [1] just don't do damage on the same scale as airliners.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Austin_suicide_attack

(But regardless, it’s not clear that the TSA is even performing that kind of calculus.)

No argument though, just saying it's a hard problem, and the scaling issue makes it somewhat awkward to deploy security resources in proportion to the threat.

I don't have a solution. I'm not exactly thrilled with the current setup, but I try to stay quiet since I can't think of anything better.

It’s most definitely a jobs program.

Federal civilian workforce (ex Postal Service and Military) is only 3 million.

TSA has 60k employees.

That's a lot of permanent 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..

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.

Private planes can do the same thing.

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

If TSA were added, there still wouldn't be any lines at private terminals.

Or is licensing and registration (of pilots and aircraft and manifest and flight plan) enough?

I wasn’t aware that DJI drone with 60lb payload was subject to more regulations than a Citation leaving TEB but I guess I’m open to learning what those are.

Edited to clarify NOT TSA

For reference

Imagine the pandemonium that would ensue if Taylor Swift were to enter an airport terminal through the normal entrance.

If this is so, why does Congress have to fund the program? Why not pass the funds through directly to the agency?

The federal government does not work like a private escrow account where a fee collected for X automatically goes to Y. Tax revenue comes in to the Treasury, and Congress decides what agencies are allowed to spend. So even if TSA screening is funded in part by a per-ticket user fee, TSA still does not get to just collect that money and use it directly. Congress has to authorize and appropriate it.

On a practical level, imagine the chaos if every federal department acted as its own tax collector and then set its own spending priorities. That is basically an argument for gutting Congress's oversight of TSA and treating it like an independent agency, just because Congress and the executive branch invented the modern shutdown in the 1980s.

Keep in mind shutdowns are a fairly new concept, that nearly no other country has. The US also didn't have it for most of its history. Congress could stop at any time it wanted.

From their website:

Covenant Aviation Security, a private company under contract with the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), provides passenger and baggage screening at SFO.

Visit Covenant Aviation Security to learn more about security screening at SFO.

https://www.flysfo.com/about/airport-operations/safety-secur...

More coverage here: https://www.npr.org/2026/03/26/nx-s1-5759273/not-all-airport...

> The Screening Partnership Program contracts security screening services at commercial airports to qualified private companies.

Examples:

* USCIS (source: https://www.aila.org/library/practice-alert-what-happens-if-...)

* 1,823/7,001 Fish and Wildlife service staff (https://www.doi.gov/sites/default/files/documents/2025-09/do...)

* 38,252/74,210 of the FDA (https://www.hhs.gov/about/budget/fy-2026-hhs-contingency-sta...)

* USPS (although as a government owned corporation the separation of funding is more obvious)

* Customs (the actual folks that process tariffs are paid for by the tariffs, unlike border patrol)

"Nonappropriated fund activities" are a thing though?

In addition, most fees (including most of the TSA fee) collected by the US Federal government isn't earmarked - it just goes into the general fund.

More breakdown here: https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/23/us/tsa-funding-security-fees-...

So even if all the money went to TSA, less than half their budget is covered. There is inherently bloat in that, but that is for a different discussion.

But bigger still, if Congress didn't reappropriate that money from TSA, they'd either have to spend less (less likely), raise taxes (not likely), or go deeper in debt (very likely) in order to cover whatever they are currently covering with their 70% share of the fee.

If you are wondering how that could happen, it starts with no-bid contracts and ends with inefficiency and has been heavily influenced by a guy whose name sounds a lot like Schmical Schmertoff.

What the fuck is the TSA even supposed to be doing? The 9/11 guys supposedly used box cutters. Does anybody seriously think you can't get a little blade like that onto an airplane in your carry on luggage? I bring double sided razor blades with every time I fly and they have never flagged it. And more importantly, does anybody actually believe you could still hijack a plane with a pocket knife? All the other passengers now know the score, they all die unless they throw themselves on you which they will and have done many times since. What's more, you won't get into the locked cockpit anyway. Airport security is solved. Basic bitch scanning for guns is all you need and we had that solved in the 90s which is the reason the hijackers used pocket knives, which no longer works. Disband the TSA.

https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/21/us/airports-without-tsa

Either because ICE is more competent than TSA or their presence is scaring away a lot of people

Edit: Newspapers have a long history of using headline editors who add “spin” otherwise reasonable stories handed in by journalists. This story was built by talking to a few entrepreneurs who offer line-sitting to see if they’d served any customers for airport security waits. Only one had.

Today I wanted to try something different so I used singlefile to make a html and then make pdf file from that html and uploaded it to archive.org

https://archive.org/details/tsa-lines-are-so-out-of-control-...

I don't wish to have news articles in my github as it clutters or I am not sure how these laws might follow (there is definitely a reason as to why archive.is creator is anonymous) and so I am looking for more anonymous ways to upload (my main intentions are that archive.ph can be nice but I feel like its not validated within wikipedia/all the controversies it has and I am just experimenting with things right now)

I have also uploaded this on catbox.moe (https://files.catbox.moe/mt9sus.html) but it has plain/text content-type, does anyone know a more anonymous content-type plain/text -> html where I can upload things perhaps, I have thoughts about creating something like this (where people can give links to text .html files and I can then display the html) but I am also a bit worried that it might be used for nefarious purposes.

I am not sure what I should do actually about it, I like thinking about archiving though, but anything other than archive.org like archive.is, can only function best if they are anonymous and I am not really anonymous/intend to be.

This makes me sympathetic of them against the journalist who tried to dox them but also I kind of understand that journalist tried approaching first from a more curiosity, maybe a threat-actor model, I had done something like this once to a service because I wanted to know if govt.'s would be able to catch them or not (they had a reddit proxy) and I found that they had their opsec secure and I was really impressed but I sometimes wonder, if the journalist also did something like this and the archive.is owner felt like it was a threat to archive and decided to ddos and all the things that followed, I sort of understand both the perspectives, so it just makes me sad as how this ended up folding up.

(This comment might've been more relevant within the archive.is drama hackernews thread but I think that its long gone and I was still forming my opinion on all of this which clearly has some nuance)

Last I heard it's a morally objectionable thing at this point rather than something that's having any practical impact.

(Which of course doesn't make it ok... I'm just a little less inclined to judge people that still use archive links when needed.)

The archive.today domains have also poisoned DNS lookups from some privacy-preserving DNS providers, and in rare cases have been caught tampering the archive data. Make of that what you will.

Every family has a "kuladeivam" which is basically a temple for that (patrilineal) lineage. Every family has one. Every temple has few families.

Then it's special for people in the same town as the temple.

Then different temples are special on different days/week/month/year.

And then on top of that some few hundred temples are special in general and are crowded 365 days of the year.

The status isn’t even necessarily money related, but can just be to see who is more “devoted”.

Plus there is a bonus start-up opportunity to LLM-code an app that enables travelers to earn money while they wait in line at the airport.

I also like articles like this because I learn from the discussions from other commenters.

In the worst case, if I am not interested in the topic, I just move on to one of the other posts. I deliberately skip over the LLM posts, but I don't tell them to stop discussing it just because it isn't of interest to me. I'm not that self centered. There is enough space on the internet for everyone's discussion.

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.

They've been covering all of this on TV news.

That's the reason why ICE and CBP agents are still collecting paychecks while the rest of DHS is not.

It's actually a bit silly that Republicans, the party of limited government, have been holding up funding the TSA and FEMA because an agency they already overspent on won't get additional dollars. Not very DOGE.

Doesn't that mean statements like "Republicans are working hard to abuse people" are just a long winded way of saying "grr I hate Republicans"? It doesn't matter who's doing the blocking, because your side is always right and Fighting For The People™, and the other side are just obstructionists blocking reasonable reforms?

Funny you're accusing me of derailing the topic when in my initial comment I specifically mentioned I wasn't interested in arguing over the merits of those reforms

>[...] Even if you're sympathetic to those reforms [...]

And for the record, in case you wanted to interpret my refusal of discussing that topic as some sort of sign I'm against them: I'm not. I just believe the topic has been discussed to death and there's no point relitigating it.

To ask why Republicans won’t participate in passing these reforms is not “derailing” the conversation. It speaks to the very heart of the problem, because if they would, we wouldn’t be in this quagmire. The public has made it pretty clear that they don’t like the status quo about how ICE has been operating lately.

You know, prior to this sentence "they" could have referred to either party. After all, the last shutdown was largely because the Democrats were fighting for ACA subsidy extensions, but I guess it's only "playing politics as sport" when you don't agree with the justification?

but yes, I think the result is that we have even less effective governance then we had a year ago. and I find it pretty troubling that the narrative that's being actively reinforced is that we really don't need to bother with the legislative process anymore since they are obviously completely useless

Wait a minute, I'm getting additional information....you're not gonna believe this, but Republicans have been voting for it. I wonder who the holdup is, then....

> In a remarkable 24 hours in Washington, House Republicans snubbed a bipartisan funding deal cut by their own Senate GOP counterparts and instead approved an entirely different plan — prolonging the Department of Homeland Security shutdown.

> Then, they left town.

It's obvious what's happening.

https://lite.cnn.com/2026/03/27/politics/dhs-shutdown-fundin...

It was also at 2 o'clock in the morning

Thune, the republican senate majority leader, was the one that put up the unanimous consent motion.

There were more than just 5 people there. Though it was late at night.

You can't push something through unanimous consent if there's not a quorum. That requires at least 51% of each party to be present.

Now, it's possible they waited until some of the big objectors to the bill fell asleep or left. But, that doesn't really change the fact that Thune pushed this through.

The session has to start with a quorum and it's assumed that there is still a quorum since nobody has done a quorum call.

I have to assume that if someone actually objected to this, they would have done a quorum call before leaving the session. That or the few objectors simply left early not thinking this would go to 2am. Though, they could have always came back. They almost certainly would have had staffers there who'd inform them that something like this was coming up.

You are correct. The Speaker of the House is a toady who is held in line in the house by a small cabal of super MAGA people. Given some of his unusual personal situations, (for one, he supposedly has no bank account or financial assets) there’s likely a blackmail situation. His supine nature is also probably the strategy for the “3rd term” loophole.

1. source on the bank account claim?

2. I don't think you need to involve theories that he's being financially blackmailed, when it's pretty clear that Trump has a tight grip over the Republican party, and isn't afraid to attack or back primary challengers for Republicans that he doesn't agree with, eg. Thomas Massie.

The one at CNN is the more interesting one. It says that he has a bank account but isn't required to disclose it "because it isn't an interest bearing account".

https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/09/politics/mike-johnson-finance...

Re: 2: I disagree.

In Turkey people with connections to the government get strobe lights permit to skip the traffic through the emergency line. There's so many opportunities both for monetization and loyalty rewarding.

Due to lapses like that sometimes I question my theory that all those people(Erdogan, Trump, Putin etc) are in the same group chat.

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.