In April we published an analysis of David Cummins, nominated to lead the Transportation Security Administration. That piece laid out what was documented at the time. Cummins was a senior executive at Serco Inc., a subsidiary of a British parent company, overseeing a civilian government services portfolio. TSA was running the largest private screening procurement in its history. And a confirmation hearing was the formal place to put questions about recusal, divestment, and commitments on the record.
We wrote then that those questions had not been asked yet.
The hearings have now happened. The Senate advanced the nomination on July 30 and a final vote is expected next week. Here is what the record now shows.
Two Hearings, Two Different Records
Cummins appeared twice.
On June 17 he appeared before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, in a panel of eleven nominees that also included a nominee to chair the Merit Systems Protection Board and a nominee for General Counsel of the Federal Labor Relations Authority. His written statement filed with that committee runs a little over five hundred words. It describes partnerships with private sector stakeholders, a culture of innovation, and support for the workforce. It does not mention the Screening Partnership Program, Gold+, or privatization anywhere.
On July 16 he appeared before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation. That hearing was devoted to his nomination alone, and privatization was central to it.
The difference between the two records matters for anyone trying to understand what the Senate was told. Prepared statements and delivered testimony routinely differ. But the entire privatization position appears in one and not the other.
What He Said About the Screening Partnership Program
In his opening statement to the Commerce Committee, Cummins described meeting a transportation security officer at Dallas Fort Worth named Lucy, and officers in Los Angeles and Indianapolis who relied on food banks during the shutdown. He then said that if confirmed, the agency would explore various ways to protect its people, including expansion of the Screening Partnership Program.
His words: some will suggest that the SPP is all about privatization and that it is anti-worker. He said he holds that it is in fact pro-worker to pay your employees, as the SPP airports did during the last shutdowns.
Later, answering the chairman on the prospect of another funding lapse, he said it is one of the reasons the agency is aggressively pushing expansion of the SPP program, because these airports need resilience, and having private contractors pay officers during a shutdown provides resilience.
That is the case, stated plainly by the nominee. It is a real argument. Contractors at SPP airports did continue paying screeners during the lapse, and federal officers went without pay. We are not going to pretend otherwise.
It is also an argument about continuity of pay during a lapse. It is not an argument about the level of pay. Those are separate questions, and the second one came up.
The Kansas City Claim
Senator Hickenlooper asked whether private screeners would provide comparable pay and benefits.
Cummins answered that he was at an SPP airport the week before, in Kansas City, and that they are actually paying their entry level officers higher than the agency pays them as federal employees. He added that from a benefit standpoint, from what he had seen, it is very comparable.
We published an analysis two days ago that used Kansas City as one of its examples, because it is one of the few airports where both numbers are public.
The contractor operating at Kansas City International advertises an hourly wage of $19.64, rising to $24.33 after one year of service, alongside a stated total compensation figure of $27.42 that it describes as including wages, benefits, and a retirement plan.
TSA publishes its own federal rates in its job announcements. Applying the locality percentage TSA itself uses, the federal SV-D entry rate in the Kansas City locality area is $19.84 per hour.
So the advertised contractor wage at Kansas City is about twenty cents below the federal entry wage. The contractor's stated total compensation figure is roughly seven dollars and fifty cents above it.
Both descriptions are accurate. They are measuring different things.
We are not calling the testimony false. We are pointing out that it depends entirely on which of the two published numbers you use, and that the difference between them is the thing an officer feels in a paycheck. That distinction is the subject of our current series, and it is not a distinction the hearing drew.
The Question He Could Not Answer
Hickenlooper pressed further, asking about the long term. His point was that whatever the starting wage, collective bargaining tends over time to hold compensation higher, and officers moving to a contractor may not have that.
Cummins answered that he could not speak to how SPP wages have evolved over the twenty five years the program has been in place. He said he could look into it and get back to the senator.
That answer is honest, and the question is answerable from public documents. Contractors publish their own job postings. The federal rates are published in TSA announcements. We have been assembling that comparison across multiple airports and multiple companies, and we will publish it.
Right of First Refusal
On the same exchange, Cummins said that as SPP expands, existing employees have the right of first refusal to take those jobs, and that in his experience all of them take the jobs and they stay there.
The right of first refusal is real. It comes from FAR 52.207-3. What that regulation requires is that a contractor offer a right of first refusal to qualified employees of the predecessor, subject to the contractor's own judgment about how many employees it needs and their suitability for the positions. The contractor's firm reporting obligation is to certify the list of employees it hired.
It is an offer requirement, not a job guarantee. Whether all officers take those offers and stay is an empirical claim, and it is one nobody has published the data on.
Collective Bargaining
Asked about codifying collective bargaining rights for TSA officers, Cummins said the agreement currently in place is being followed because of a court order, and that its rules have an impact on the agency's flexibility to scale with variable demand. He described shift bidding months in advance, difficulty trading shifts, and seniority based assignment, and said national security should never be hindered by work rules that limit the ability to flex.
He also said he is not anti union, that he has had union workers under him for years, and that in his view there is no material compensation language difference between the current agreement and the SPP airports. He noted that the San Francisco SPP airport has a bargaining agreement in place, so officers do not give up the right to one.
That last point is accurate and worth understanding precisely. San Francisco has a bargaining agreement because screeners there organized and because the City and County of San Francisco has its own quality standards ordinance. It is not something the Screening Partnership Program provides. It is something workers built on top of it, over more than a decade.
What Still Was Not Asked
The three questions our April piece identified remain unasked on the public record. No senator asked which contracts would require recusal. None asked what financial interests would be divested. None asked what ethics commitments he would make before taking office.
Serco came up twice. The ranking member of the Commerce Committee noted reports that Serco has trained immigration enforcement officers and that its overseas immigration detention facilities have drawn criticism from human rights groups, and said he hoped the nominee could shed light on those issues. Another senator asked Cummins how many of his five thousand Serco employees went unpaid when they came to work, to make a point about the shutdown.
Neither exchange concerned the procurement.
Written questions for the record were due to the committee on July 17, with responses due July 20. Those documents exist. When they become available, they may contain answers the hearings did not.
What We Are Watching
A final Senate vote is expected next week. Gold+ contract awards are anticipated before the end of the fiscal year on September 30. Phase 1 proposals for the Gold+ contract vehicle closed today.
If confirmed, Cummins would arrive during the award window for a program that will determine what happens to the workforce at Tampa, Charleston, and Des Moines, and potentially at many more airports after that.
We will keep reading the documents.
For the earlier analysis, see Who Is David Cummins? For the compensation analysis referenced above, see You Have Three Numbers. Only One of Them Is Your Paycheck.
If you want to understand how any of this applies to your own situation, that is a conversation worth having. It costs you nothing. againstgiantsllc.com/get-help.html or info@againstgiantsllc.com