Senate GOP privacy hawks are stewing over the derailment of a bill earlier this week that would limit face scanning technologies — and blaming the TSA for interference in an under-the-radar legislative battle.
On the surface, Senate Commerce Chair Ted Cruz had to cancel consideration of the bipartisan bill that would put guardrails on the airport security screening tool due to intense lobbying from the travel industry, which had sowed seeds of doubt among committee members.
Privately, though, Republicans who support the measure say it was the TSA itself, with the encouragement of its politically appointed leadership, that assumed a critical role in orchestrating the lobbying campaign that grew opposition and forced the legislation to be scrapped at the last minute from the markup docket.
The episode is now exposing a rift between an administration that wants to increase the use of technology to slash bureaucracy at federal agencies and Republican privacy hawks on Capitol Hill who don’t like being undermined.
“The short answer is yes; the long answer is hell yes,” said Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.), a co-sponsor of the bill, when asked if TSA had been raising concerns. “They’re working like an ugly stripper to kill this bill, which tells me we’re doing the right thing.”
A senior Senate GOP aide, granted anonymity to speak candidly, said earlier in the week that the “smears against [the] bill have TSA’s fingerprints all over it.”
The aide also said TSA’s effective lobbying against the bill would “not bode well” for the potential confirmation prospects of Ha Nguyen McNeill, the current acting head of the agency whom President Donald Trump is expected to nominate to serve as permanent administrator.
McNeill is a former executive at a company that supplies AI-powered facial recognition software to airports, which the company touts as being able to match a photo against a gallery of millions of mugshots in a matter of milliseconds.
A screenshot of a text message reviewed by POLITICO also shows a lobbyist for a travel association saying they heard directly from TSA officials that they had significant concerns about the bill. A screenshot of another text message shows an administration official explaining how the TSA was advocating against certain provisions of the legislation.
A spokesperson for the TSA did not provide a statement in response to requests for comment, including whether McNeill has been personally raising concerns about the bill.
The bill would require the TSA to clearly notify every passenger of their right to opt out of facial screenings at airport security checkpoints and choose a manual identity verification process instead. It also would put broad limits on the administration’s ability to store biometric information of passengers captured by the airport scans.
Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), the bill’s champion, in an interview compared the TSA’s increasing use of facial recognition capabilities to similar apparatuses used by authoritarian countries like China and Hungary to conduct massive citizen surveillance.
“It’s been used to intimidate, to track and to intimidate freedom of expression and freedom of assembly,” Merkley said.
Merkley tried to shoehorn the legislation into last year’s reauthorization of Federal Aviation Administration programs. But associations representing airlines, airport employees and other travel-related businesses fiercely opposed it, arguing it would allow bad actors to opt for manual ID checks and significantly increase wait times at airport security checkpoints.
Industry backlash against the proposal is well enough known that it might have been the reason lobbyists weren’t given an advance heads-up about the Commerce committee’s plans to mark up the measure, Ryan Propis, vice president of security and facilitation at the U.S. Travel Association, intimated.
“The discussion at the time was that there’s going to be more transparency, more hearings … around the use of biometrics,” said Propis in an interview about assurances the industry received at the time of Merkley’s efforts to get the bill included in the FAA reauthorization. “And unfortunately none of that has happened.”
But lawmakers who have been trying to push the bill forward are saying that TSA was the real driving force behind the legislation’s withdrawal, with the agency using industry lobbyists as conduits to relay dissatisfaction and mar the measure’s chances.
When asked Thursday whether he believed TSA itself was raising concerns about the bill, Cruz replied, “undoubtedly.”
The burgeoning industry tasked with supplying technologies that use sophisticated biometric data for identity verification, and which are increasingly powered by AI algorithms, have also arrived on the scene to tank the bill.
Two of the sector’s top associations, the Security Industry Association and the International Biometrics and Identity Association, sent a letter on the eve of the scheduled markup to Cruz and the top Commerce Committee Democrat, Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington. In the missive, they contended that the bill was “completely out of line with the Trump Administration’s stated priorities for federal agencies to increasingly incorporate advanced technologies and limit unnecessary personnel costs.”
Since the start of Trump’s second term, the administration has been pushing for federal agencies to slash budgets and reduce personnel, touting technological advances like artificial intelligence as a cheaper, more efficient backfill.
Testifying before House appropriators in May on the Trump administration’s proposed $247 million cut to the TSA budget, McNeill also noted that her agency has been deploying state-of-the-art screening technology to airports around the globe, adding that “a commitment to continually embracing new and emerging technology is urgently needed.”
Following the postponement of the bill’s consideration in committee, Cruz and other members of the panel said they were confident differences could be resolved in time to bring it up at a subsequent business meeting — and gave no indication they were planning to stand down despite administration opposition.
“I think the bill will get marked up,” said Cruz, “and it’s going to pass.”
