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TSA Killed Gold+. Privatization Isn't Dead.
Two weeks ago, we covered Tampa, Charleston, and Des Moines opting into TSA Gold+, the program handing checkpoint staffing and screening technology to private contractors at those three airports. We said to watch for the contractor announcement, not the opt-in, because that’s when things would get real.
Things got real. Just not the way anyone expected. On August 24, new TSA Administrator David P. Cummins killed Gold+ outright and rolled its private-sector role into what the agency is calling an evolved Screening Partnership Program, part of a new 25-year framework TSA is branding “Horizon 25.” Tampa International had already bailed on Gold+ that same morning. Charleston and Des Moines haven’t said the same — yet. And the union declaring victory is technically right and also missing the bigger point: privatized screening isn’t going away. It’s getting a new label.
Quick Verdict
What happened TSA retired Gold+ on Aug 24, 2026, roughly three months after its May 2026 launch Replaced by An “evolved” Screening Partnership Program (SPP), folding Gold+‘s private-sector role into TSA’s older contractor model Who announced it New TSA Administrator David P. Cummins, as part of the agency’s Horizon 25 Strategy Tampa (TPA) Officially backed out of Gold+ the same day, staying with federal TSA officers Charleston (CHS) / Des Moines (DSM) No public reversal yet as of this writing Does privatization end? No. TSA says it will “accelerate” public-private screening through SPP — the same 20-airport model that’s run since 2004 AFGE lawsuit Still pending — filed Aug. 5, 2026, seeking records on how Gold+ was built What else is in Horizon 25 PreCheck expansion, checkpoint modernization, counter-drone capabilities, rollout starting September 2026
What Actually Happened on August 24
Cummins, in the job long enough to have his name on a strategy document but not long enough to have defended Gold+ in public, announced Horizon 25 ahead of TSA’s 25th anniversary. The framing is aspirational — “a Golden Age of Travel,” Cummins called it — built around three goals: modernize checkpoints, improve the traveler experience, and harden security across other modes of transportation, not just aviation.
Buried in that is the actual news: Gold+, the program that let private contractors control both checkpoint staffing and screening equipment at opted-in airports, is done. TSA says its role gets absorbed into an “evolved” version of the Screening Partnership Program — the older, narrower model that’s let contractors staff checkpoints (with TSA still owning the equipment) at 20 U.S. airports since 2004, including San Francisco and Kansas City.
Three months. That’s the entire lifespan of Gold+ as a standalone program, from its May 2026 rollout to its August 24 retirement. For a policy that was supposed to reshape how a chunk of U.S. airport security gets staffed, that’s not a long run.
Tampa Bailed the Same Morning
Tampa International announced its own reversal the same day, and airport COO John Tiliacos didn’t frame it as a political statement — he framed it as due diligence that didn’t check out. “The technology component was a big decision maker for us,” he told reporters at a press conference, adding that airport officials “weren’t quite satisfied that we were getting all of the answers to our questions regarding technology.” CEO Michael Stephens’ statement leaned the other direction, thanking the airport’s existing federal TSA staff for their “professionalism and commitment to security and service.”
Tampa Bay Times and Creative Loafing Tampa both reported the reversal as a genuine reaction to months of local pushback — U.S. Rep. Kathy Castor had publicly urged TPA not to privatize, and the roughly 800 workers who would’ve faced contractor employment, early retirement, or relocation weren’t quiet about it either. TSA’s national announcement came the same morning, which makes the sequencing genuinely ambiguous: did Tampa’s local reversal help kill the national program, or did TSA tell Tampa what was coming and let the airport get its statement out first? Neither TSA nor TPA has clarified which came first, and reporters covering both stories haven’t nailed it down either.
Charleston and Des Moines, the other two Gold+ airports we wrote about two weeks ago, haven’t issued anything like Tampa’s statement as of this writing. Their Gold+ opt-ins technically still stand — there’s just no longer a Gold+ program for them to stand inside of.
What Is TSA’s Horizon 25 Strategy?
Horizon 25 is TSA’s new 25-year strategic framework, announced August 24, 2026 by Administrator David P. Cummins ahead of the agency’s 25th anniversary. It sets three priorities — modernized checkpoints, an improved traveler experience, and stronger multimodal transportation security — and folds Gold+‘s privatization goals into an expanded Screening Partnership Program instead of running it as a separate track.
Beyond the SPP shift, Horizon 25 covers a handful of initiatives that have nothing to do with contractors:
- PreCheck expansion. TSA wants to grow enrollment and streamline the PreCheck experience further, though specifics on new lanes or partner airports weren’t detailed in the initial announcement.
- Checkpoint modernization. Faster technology procurement, described as cutting through the federal acquisition cycle that’s historically slowed how fast new scanners reach checkpoints.
- Counter-drone capabilities. Expanded unmanned aircraft systems detection — a priority that has nothing to do with the walk-through checkpoint experience but everything to do with airport perimeter security.
- Multimodal security. A stated push to harden security beyond aviation, into rail and transit systems TSA also has jurisdiction over.
- Implementation kickoff. Cummins plans to convene TSA field staff and outside “innovators” starting September 2026 to move these priorities from strategy document to actual rollout.
Most of that is forward-looking and vague enough that it’s not really news yet — it’s a mission statement. The part that’s actual news is goal three folding into goal one: private-sector screening didn’t get cut from the plan. It got absorbed into it.
Gold+ vs. the “Evolved” SPP: What’s Actually Different
Here’s where the coverage from this week is getting sloppy. A lot of outlets ran headlines implying TSA privatization is over. It isn’t. Here’s what changed and what didn’t:
| Gold+ (dead) | Evolved SPP (current plan) | |
|---|---|---|
| Contractor controls staffing | Yes | Yes |
| Contractor controls equipment/technology | Yes — this was Gold+‘s whole differentiator | Unclear — TSA hasn’t published specifics |
| Number of airports currently running it | 3 opted in (TPA has since backed out) | 20, running since 2004, with Atlanta reportedly exploring a transition |
| TSA sets standards, runs oversight | Yes | Yes |
| Program name TSA is actively promoting | No — retired Aug. 24 | Yes — “accelerate” was Cummins’ actual word |
Aviation-security consultant Keith Jeffries put his finger on why Gold+ specifically died, not the underlying idea: it was vague. “For every answer to a question, there must have been 20 more questions associated with it,” he said of the program — which lines up almost exactly with Tampa’s stated reason for walking away. Jeffries also called it plainly: Cummins is likely “rebranding some of the ideas behind Gold+” inside the SPP framework, not abandoning them.
One former DHS official was blunter about the whiplash: “They put so much energy and messaging behind Gold+, and then all of a sudden it’s like, ‘Yeah, never mind.’” That’s the tell. You don’t retire a flagship initiative after three months because you’ve changed your mind about the underlying strategy. You retire it because the branding, the rollout, or the paperwork trail became a bigger liability than the program was worth — and you keep pursuing the same goal under a name with less baggage attached.
The Union Declared Victory. Should It Have?
AFGE, which represents roughly 47,000 TSA officers, is treating this as a win, and for Tampa specifically, it is one. National President Everett Kelley praised the airport directly: “Tampa airport officials made the right call, and I hope other airports thinking of privatizing their security functions will follow suit and stay with TSA.” He’s also been consistent on the broader argument, calling the federal screening model — the one that’s “kept the flying public safe for nearly 25 years” — something that “should be applauded instead of abandoned.”
Fair enough, as far as Tampa goes. It’s worth remembering why Gold+ existed at all: contractor-run checkpoints reportedly held up better during this year’s funding lapses than federally staffed ones did, and that argument didn’t get less true just because the program built around it got retired. But notice what AFGE isn’t declaring victory over: the Screening Partnership Program itself, which predates Gold+ by 22 years and isn’t going anywhere. If anything, Cummins said TSA plans to “accelerate” it. Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson — the busiest airport in the country — is reportedly exploring its own SPP transition right now, a story that got a fraction of the attention Gold+‘s launch did back in May, probably because “TSA looks at expanding a 22-year-old program slightly” doesn’t headline as well as “TSA privatizes three airports.”
AFA-CWA President Sara Nelson, whose union represents flight attendants rather than screeners, framed the stakes in starker terms, invoking “the dangerous reality of the pre-9/11 aviation security landscape, which relied on a fractured patchwork of private security contractors.” That’s a real historical argument and worth taking seriously. It’s also an argument against contracted screening generally — which means it’s an argument AFGE and AFA-CWA still have to make against SPP, not one that ended when Gold+ did.
The AFGE Lawsuit Nobody’s Talking About Anymore
Easy to lose track of amid the Horizon 25 news: AFGE sued TSA on August 5, 2026, in federal court in D.C., after the agency blew past the deadline on a FOIA request for records on how Gold+ got built and approved in the first place. That lawsuit hasn’t been withdrawn, dismissed, or resolved by anything that happened on August 24. Gold+ the program is dead. The records AFGE is suing to obtain are records about Gold+ specifically — and given that TSA is now folding Gold+‘s design into SPP rather than scrapping the underlying approach, those records arguably matter more now, not less. If you want to know how TSA actually arrived at “hand contractors the equipment budget too,” that lawsuit is still the only mechanism forcing that answer into public view.
What This Means If You’re Flying Through TPA, CHS, or DSM
Practically, less changes than the headlines suggest either direction:
- Tampa: Back to business as usual. Federal TSA officers, no contractor transition, nothing to prepare for.
- Des Moines and Charleston: Officially still Gold+ airports with no Gold+ program left to belong to. Expect an announcement — either a Tampa-style reversal or a transition into the “evolved” SPP model — before their original January and February 2027 target dates arrive.
- Everyone flying through an existing SPP airport — SFO, Kansas City, and 18 others — nothing changes for you at all. That model isn’t new, isn’t being retired, and per Cummins is getting more investment, not less.
- PreCheck and CLEAR members: Still unaffected, same as we noted with Gold+ and with TSA’s biometric ID rollout. Nothing in Horizon 25 touches how those programs work at the checkpoint.
None of this is a reason to change how you plan a trip through any of these airports this fall. It’s a reason to stop assuming a canceled program name means a canceled policy.
The Bottom Line
TSA didn’t reverse course on privatized airport security. It reversed course on a specific, badly-explained version of it that couldn’t survive three months of public scrutiny, a union lawsuit, and one airport’s own due-diligence process finding more questions than answers. The Screening Partnership Program that absorbs Gold+‘s ambitions is 22 years old, runs at 20 airports already, and — per the administrator who just killed its rebrand — is getting “accelerated,” not shelved. Tampa’s win is real. The broader fight AFGE and AFA-CWA are actually trying to win isn’t over. It just lost its most controversial name.
Details current as of August 25, 2026, based on TSA’s official Horizon 25 announcement, AFGE’s public statements and pending FOIA lawsuit, and reporting from the Tampa Bay Times, Creative Loafing Tampa, WUSF, and Federal News Network. Contractor announcements for Charleston and Des Moines, and further Horizon 25 implementation details expected starting September 2026, may change this picture — verify current status at TSA.gov before assuming any of this is final.
