Comment by crazygringo
1 day ago
It may be many things, but I very much doubt the motivation is a money grab. A few people paying $45 isn't lining the pockets of some government official, or plugging a hole in any possible budget.
Dealing with the presence of travelers who haven't updated their driver's licenses requires a bunch of extra staff to perform the time-consuming additional verifications. The basic idea is for those staff to be paid by the people using them, rather than by taxpayers and air travelers more generally. As well as there being a small deterrent effect.
There is no legal requirement to show id or answer any questions to establish identification before flying. In other words there is no extra work required by law which the fee would cover.
The TSA is literally doing all this extra work though, whether or not you think it's required by law. They're not just pocketing the $45 and then blindly waving you ahead.
Let's be more precise. The TSA has created extra work for themselves, and are charging us for it, whether it's legally required or not (because they pretend that it is).
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Flying without ID just gets you the full patdown treatment. It’s not like they’re tracking down people to vouch for you.
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Like someone who would deliberately show up to work in a speedo because "show me where in the employee handbook it says I must wear pants"
A better analogy would be a legally protected right to show up to work dressed in street clothes, your boss imposes an illegal requirement to wear a specific uniform, and then attempts to charge you if you show up without one.
Is this the case, I didn't see it in the article.
If they have to perform extra work then I'd say it's justified. If it's just a punishment for not getting a real ID I'm not sure if that's fair
$45 x millions of people (some multiple times) = an incredibly consequential amount of money
It's not millions of people, most people get Real ID. In the context of airport security budgets, it's not that much. And it's used for hiring the additional staff required and putting together the identity verification systems they use.
> It's not millions of people, most people get Real ID
Those that did had to pay $30-$60 plus fees (actual cost differs by state) to get one and will have to pay that again and again each renewal. This is certainly making money somewhere for somebody and not at all about security
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As of the imposition of start of this new fee/fine, about 200,000 people a day fly without ID or without REAL-ID: https://papersplease.org/wp/2025/05/28/200000-people-a-day-f... - At $45 a pop, that would bring in >$3B a year. "A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking about real money."
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“Most” people can have it and there’d still be millions (tens of millions, even over 100mill) of people who don’t. Multiple states don’t even require it. That guarantees several million people right there.
I think New York is one, so well over 10mill people don’t require it. Do you seriously think most of those people are getting one anyway? Guarantee you there are millions of people without it if not tens of millions. I’d put money on it.
So back to the point, we’re talking likely 100’s of millions of dollars. That is nothing to sneeze at. The TSA is an $11bill operation based on a quick search. $500mill (~11mill people) would be 5% of their annual budget.
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Assuming 100M "classic" ID checks (being generous): congrats, you just paid for two days of running the military!
So trump can use this money to invade and finish taking over Greenland!
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5% of TSA’s annual budget ain’t nothing to scoff at.
But everyone would have to take advantage of that benefit not having ID have with themselves.
The roughly 7.6 million CLEAR members paying $209/yr grosses them north of $1 billion/year. It's not hard to see why TSA wants to get in on it.
CLEAR members are going out of their way to register their info in a biometric identification system. I don't think the people avoiding REAL IDs are the same demographic.
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