Stories the data tells

The FY2027 budget proposes moving small-airport screening to private contractors under the Screening Partnership Program. The target universe: … small and nonhub airports — …% of U.S. commercial airports carrying just …% of passengers. … are in SPP today. See it on the map.

Meanwhile the program's anchor contract is in play: … The administration's nominee for TSA Administrator comes from Serco, an SPP-eligible contractor — the agency has had no confirmed Administrator for over a year.

During the 76-day DHS-only shutdown (Feb 14 – Apr 30, 2026), TSA's daily checkpoint throughput never blinked — screening continued every single day. The money side tells the other half: TSA's monthly net outlays per the Monthly Treasury Statement swung to … in October 2025 (govt-wide shutdown) and … in April 2026 — a negative month: more money flowed back into Treasury than out.

Two official series, side by side. Officers worked unpaid; the full money-flow view is here.

TSA's pay-equity plan took effect July 2023. In the salary data (OPM FedScope, band-midpoint method), mean TSO (occupation 1802) pay jumped from $… (Jun 2023) to $… (Dec 2023) — +…%.

Headcount followed: … employees () → … (). And the budget paid for it: the FY24 final bill added +$…M over FY23 enacted for Screener Personnel, Compensation & Benefits alone (P.L. 118-47 explanatory statement).

Postscript: OPM's Mar-2025 cube fully redacts TSA pay — this series can no longer be rebuilt from current publications (see Arc 06).

Passengers pay a $5.60 per-one-way security fee — about $2.9B a year. Where it goes, per Treasury receipt accounts (FY…): … swept to the general fund for deficit reduction (account 070-0900), … to the Aviation Security Capital Fund (070-5385), and roughly $1B credited directly against TSA's operating appropriation as offsetting collections.

The diversion is now opposed by both a bipartisan bill and the administration's own budget. One more wrinkle: in DHS's audited financial statements the fee appears only as exchange revenue — there is no line item anywhere in the AFRshowing what passengers actually paid. The dialect that collects the money can't see it.

Congress multiplied PC&I Checkpoint Support nearly 8× in FY26: $…K → $…K (+$…M) — the checkpoint-screening recap money. Execution so far: account 070-0410 shows … obligated against … available (as of ).

The watchdogs were already on it — at current rates the CT/CPSS deployment schedules run to the 2040s:

Four closures documented while building this site, all in the last 18 months:

• OMB took down public apportionments in 2025; restored by court order Aug 2025, with expanded disclosure ordered Jan 2026.
• OPM's March-2025 FedScope cube fully redacts TSA-pay-plan salaries — the TSO pay series in Arc 03 can no longer be reconstructed from current publications.
• The FY2026 congressional justification shipped with no performance tables — the first TSA CJ without them.
• The FY2027 Budget-in-Brief URL died within weeks of publication (document moved, no redirect).

This is why the monitor archives every source document, hashed, at retrieval time — the methodology page lists all of them. When a public document disappears, the archived copy is the defensible record.