A coalition of organizations representing the travel, tourism, airport and airline industries, as well as the traveling public, are joining forces, urging leaders in the House and Senate to not divert $9.2 billion collected for aviation security to pay for the highway trust fund or any other purpose not related to air travel.
In a letter to the bipartisan leadership of the Senate Finance Committee and the House Ways and Means Committee, Airlines for America (A4A), Airports Council International – North America (ACI-NA), the Global Business Travel Association (GBTA), The International Air Transport Association (IATA), Travelers United and the U.S. Travel Association, opposed a revenue diversion provision in the U.S. Senate-approved highway bill. Under that bill, funds that airline passengers pay to the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) for security would be diverted to replenish the highway trust fund.
“Airline passengers should not be used as a piggy bank to pay for highway investments that benefit highway users,” the letter stated. “Additionally, using TSA security fees to offset the deficit in the Bipartisan Budget Act was a misguided policy choice that redirected important security funds away from their intended and needed use. To charge travelers more without an increase in service or benefit cannot and should not become a common practice for policy makers.”
The coalition noted its support for a long-term highway bill that enables and encourages infrastructure investment, while rejecting any suggestion that highway funding unfairly be generated via an increase in the aviation passenger’s CBP fees.
“We share your goal of reaching a compromise to provide healthy highway funding, but we urge you to ensure that basic principles of fairness are upheld,” the group said. “We appreciate the funding challenges that face our nation, but the burden to fund all aspects of the federal government should not fall on the shoulders of aviation passengers.”
This fee diversion is a new development that was introduced last year when the 9/11 Security Fee was almost doubled and the budget deal allowed for money that was earmarked for security to be used for the general fund. This tactic has become a favorite of budget manipulators, allowing them to not raise “taxes” but raise fees and divert them.
Even local politicians, piggybacking on this unprecedented federal diversion, have suggested the same for local governments.
With shootings and homicides up 21 percent, O’Shea [a representative from Chicago’s South Side] is proposing what he calls an innovative public-private partnership that would “leverage the value” of O’Hare and Midway Airports to bankroll the hiring of at least 100 additional police officers.
Specifically, the resolution that O’Shea introduced at Wednesday’s City Council meeting calls on airlines operating at Chicago airports to “voluntarily” impose a $1 surcharge on the 100 million passengers who flow through O’Hare and Midway each year.
The $100 million would help fund police services in the districts that include O’Hare and Midway. That would free at least some of those officers to be deployed elsewhere, presumably in South and West Side districts plagued by gang violence.
At roughly $100,000 in salary and benefits-per-officer, $100 million would bankroll the hiring of 100 additional police officers.
Federal law has long required the cash cow of airport revenues — generated by everything from parking and concessions to airline rents and landing fees — to be used only at the airports.
This kind of diversion of fees collected for specified use, illegal for years and not considered, may now become acceptable because of the federal budget maneuvers. This time the fee diversion is applied to fees collected from airline passengers. The next time it may be applied to any other portion of the taxpayer universe.
This kind of taxation, if allowed to spread, would allow states and localities to follow the federal example and tax many other services outside of their jurisdictions.
Charlie Leocha is the President of Travelers United. He has been working in Washington, DC, for the past 14 years with Congress, the Department of Transportation, and industry stakeholders on travel issues. He was the first consumer representative to the Advisory Committee for Aviation Consumer Protections appointed by the Secretary of Transportation from 2012 through 2018.
