TSA announced yesterday that Gold+ is being replaced by an evolved Screening Partnership Program. Administrator David Cummins has been in the job seventeen days.
That looks abrupt. It is not.
He said this at his confirmation hearing, five weeks before he took office, and he was specific about it.
What He Told the Committee
On July 16, Cummins appeared before the Senate Commerce Committee. In his opening statement he said that if confirmed, the agency would explore various ways to protect its people, "including the expansion of the Screening Partnership Program, or SPP."
Answering the chairman later, he said it more directly.
Answering another member on workforce protections, he said, "as we expand the SPP program, which we fully intend to do, the existing employees have the right of first refusal."
Throughout his testimony, the program he described expanding was the Screening Partnership Program. The ranking member raised Gold+ by name in his opening statement, describing it as a program that would let private contractors manage, procure, and upgrade screening technology. Cummins answered in terms of SPP.
Gold+ Was Not His Program
This matters for understanding what happened.
Gold+ was developed and announced under prior agency leadership. TSA announced it publicly on May 14, 2026. The solicitation published June 24 with a $12.9 billion ceiling. Phase 1 proposals closed July 31. Cummins was sworn in August 7. The official who led the agency through the program's development departs September 3.
The administration's fiscal year 2027 budget proposal, released in April, proposed requiring category III and IV airports to enroll in the Screening Partnership Program. Not Gold+. SPP.
So the budget request and the nominee were describing the same vehicle before Cummins ever took office. The program that has now been replaced was the one that did not appear in either.
What He Said About Officers
Three answers from that hearing are worth revisiting now that SPP is the whole program rather than one track alongside another.
On whether privatization is anti-worker, he said the opposite.
On what happens to officers, he said existing employees have the right of first refusal, and added, "in our experience, all of them take the jobs and they stay there."
On whether officers currently earning above the statutory minimum would be protected, he said contractors "will generally match hourly wage rates for employees who are coming over," and then said, "That's not a guarantee."
The Question He Could Not Answer
The most important exchange came when a member pressed him on the long term.
The point was that whatever an officer earns on day one, collective bargaining tends over time to hold compensation higher, and officers moving to a contractor may not have that.
Cummins answered honestly.
That question was a fair one when SPP was a program at twenty airports. It is a different question now that SPP is the vehicle for whatever comes next, at whatever number of airports follow.
We have published what the public record shows on that subject. TSA's own litigating position, upheld by the Government Accountability Office, is that the statute requires a single minimum level of compensation rather than a match of an officer's accrued pay, and that experience may be counted from years served on the contract. Contractors at existing SPP airports publish their own wage rates, and those rates are checkable against the federal rates TSA publishes in its job announcements.
The answer to that senator's question exists. It is in documents anyone can pull.
What Horizon 25 Does Not Address
Cummins listed four priorities when he was sworn in on August 7. Workforce and morale came first, followed by checkpoint technology, wait time information for travelers, and hardening networks against drone and cyber threats.
Horizon 25 carries the same four, plus one sentence replacing Gold+.
The workforce message announcing that change ran five paragraphs. The sentence about replacing Gold+ was the fourth. It did not name the three airports that had opted in, did not say what happens to the officers there, and did not give a timeline.
We are not going to characterize that. We are going to note that the first stated priority was workforce and morale, and describe how the workforce was told.
For the workforce memo in full, see One Sentence, Fourth of Five.
The Distinction Worth Watching
There is one question underneath all of this that nobody has answered.
The Screening Partnership Program and Gold+ were not the same thing, and TSA said so in its own procurement documents.
The SPP solicitation, 70T05025R5900N002, describes what it buys this way:
The Gold+ solicitation, 70T05026R5900N005, describes what it buys this way:
One buys screening services. The other buys technology, maintenance, and workforce together. That is why Gold+ existed as a separate program with a separate solicitation rather than as a modification to SPP.
TSA has said an evolved Screening Partnership Program will replace Gold+. It has not said what evolved means.
Two things are worth knowing while waiting for that answer.
The first is that the SPP contract vehicle already exists and does not expire. Its ordering period runs from September 2025 through August 2035. It has already been awarded, twenty-one companies hold it, and TSA has stated that future airport task orders go only to those holders. An evolved program could be executed as task orders under that vehicle without a new solicitation, without a new competition, and without a public procurement event that anyone outside the process would know to watch for.
The second is that TSA already has a mechanism for putting privately funded equipment into a checkpoint. It is called the Capability Acceptance Process. In answering bidder questions on the Gold+ solicitation, TSA described the Acceptable Capabilities List as the official list of approved screening equipment and technologies that third parties may donate or bail to the agency for security operations. TSA's own materials on checkpoint connectivity state that the agency aims to leverage that process to establish strategic partnerships with airports and industry on integrating checkpoint infrastructure.
Put those together and the private capital piece does not require a program that changes who owns what. An airport or a vendor funds the equipment, the acceptance process brings it into service, and a contractor already holding an IDIQ operates it.
We are not asserting that this is the plan. Nothing published says it. But it is what to look for in whatever defines the successor program, because it is the difference between a program being cancelled and a program being reassembled from parts that already exist.
What Is Still Unknown
What an evolved Screening Partnership Program is, whether it will be executed through the existing SPP contract vehicle, and how private technology investment reaches the checkpoint under it.
What happens to solicitation 70T05026R5900N005 and to the proposals submitted July 31.
Whether Des Moines and Charleston remain in anything.
Whether the FY2027 proposal to require category III and IV airports to enroll in SPP moves forward, and on what timeline.
Cummins told the Senate what direction he intended to take. He has now taken the first step in that direction, within three weeks of taking office. The rest of the answers will come from documents, and we will read them as they appear.
For our coverage of the nomination and the hearings, see Who Is David Cummins? and The Cummins Hearings.
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