GOP lawmakers set sights on abolishing TSA

Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) said the time has arrived for the Transportation Security Administration to be grounded – and he has at least one Republican in the lower chamber on board.

Lee made the comments on Monday in a string of social media remarks where he also called for an end to the Affordable Care Act when lawmakers return next month with a Republican trifecta.

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“Congress should abolish TSA,” Lee told his social media followers on X. “If Congress somehow can’t abolish it, Congress should at least (1) privatize it, and then (2) require what remains of TSA to truly compete with private security contractors.”

The Utah senator’s announcement caught the attention of Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO), who reposted Lee’s comment with her own remark: “Hear, hear!” she wrote.

The proposal to do away with the TSA – created weeks after the 9/11 terrorist attacks – would upend safety measures for the country’s mass transportation. But the agency has landed on the radar of conservatives who have criticized it for overstepping its authority and violating peoples’ rights.

Congressional Republicans have promised to gut several federal agencies when Donald Trump reemerges in the White House next month, including the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, or ATF, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Department of Education.

Lee in March also proposed axing the TSA.

But political scientist Rachel Bitecofer pushed back on the suggestion being floated by Lee and other conservatives with a stinging two-word rebuke: "OK moron," she wrote in an X reply above a photo of a second plane preparing to slam into the World Trade Center on 9/11.