Have we forgotten the lessons of 9/11?

Step into the TSA PreCheck lane at Los Angeles International this week and the person ahead of you might not be flying anywhere.

Since early this month, the Transportation Security Administration has allowed vetted travelers without tickets to clear the checkpoint and walk to a gate to meet an arriving grandmother or see off a college kid.

The program is called Gateside by TSA PreCheck. It costs nothing and is currently running at 13 airports. And the agency’s pitch for it is sentiment, not security.

Gateside, it says, brings back “the moments that once defined air travel.”

Those moments ended on a Tuesday morning 25 years ago. Gate passes were among the first things to get jettisoned. Now they’re back, the shoe rule is gone, the liquids limit is under review, and the job of screening you may soon belong to a private contractor. Each piece has a reasonable-sounding explanation.

But put them on a timeline and things look a little different.

What the TSA has handed back

The restrictions on shoes went first. On July 8, 2025, the Department of Homeland Security ended the removal requirement that had been in place nationwide since 2006, a rule born from Richard Reid’s attempt to light a bomb in his sneaker on a Paris-to-Miami flight in December 2001.

The liquids rule is next in line. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in July 2025 that the 3-1-1 limit was under review, and TSA officials told reporters around the September 11 anniversary this year that airports with CT scanners may eventually let you carry a full water bottle through. No formal change has been announced.

Screening itself went on the block. In 2026, the agency rolled out Gold+, a model in which private contractors would run both the screening workforce and the checkpoint technology while it supervised these activities. Des Moines, Charleston and Tampa signed up.

In late August, after roughly three months, the agency scrapped Gold+ but didn’t give up on the idea. David Cummins, the new administrator and a former senior vice president at the British contractor Serco Group, is replacing it with an expanded version of the older Screening Partnership Program under a plan called Horizon 25. Private screeners are already in use by 20 airports. About 47,000 federal screeners are watching to see what happens to their jobs.

All of this is happening while the agency has less capacity than it used to. The Homeland Security shutdown earlier this year had screeners working without pay and produced hours-long lines at some airports in March.

Its own record isn’t reassuring either. A 2019 GAO audit found that of nine vulnerabilities identified through covert testing since 2015, none had been formally resolved as of September 2018. In 2024, TSA screeners intercepted 6,678 firearms at checkpoints, and 94 percent of them were loaded. Those guns were stopped by a person watching a screen.

And now you can walk to the gate

The agency’s argument for introducing Gateside is that it’s safe. Computed tomography scanners produce a three-dimensional image a screener can rotate, which the agency says makes shoe removal and the small-bottle rule unnecessary at equipped checkpoints. PreCheck members submit fingerprints and submit to a background check, so extending the lane to a vetted person without a ticket adds no unvetted body to the secure side.

Real ID enforcement closed the identity loophole. Cockpit doors are hardened. And the layered-defense argument carries real weight: RAND researcher Kelly Klima notes there hasn’t been a successful attack on a screened U.S. commercial flight since 2001, and credits the agency for it. Her colleague John Hollywood makes the case for layers working together, while cautioning that the goal is to “stay vigilant but not overreactive.”

But have we gone too far?