Does Amtrak Need Airport-Level Security?

My Hoover colleague Jon Hartley wrote an article this week titled “Why Amtrak Needs Airport-Level Security.” It’s a short article, so I suggest reading it for yourself.

Jon starts by pointing out that Cole Allen, who attempted to assassinate President Trump, took the train from California to the East Coast and carried his weapons with him. Jon writes:

The details of this event point to a broader problem about security within the US: Passenger rail in the United States, unlike air travel, allows individuals to board with minimal identity verification and little baggage screening. Passengers can arrive shortly before departure and carry large amounts of luggage without inspection.

Jon makes an economic argument:

The economic case for enhanced rail security is also relevant. A single significant security incident would impose large costs, including loss of life, disruption to transportation networks, and reduced public confidence. Preventive measures can be viewed as an investment in our nation’s security infrastructure that meaningfully reduces the probability of these left-tail outcomes. While there are upfront costs, these could be justified by the reduction in long term risk.

Notice the absence of actual numbers. How big would the costs of a single security incident be? And, more important, how likely would such an incident be? With our current system for Amtrak, where the government does not check people’s bags, we haven’t had such an incident yet. That suggests that the probability of a very bad outcome is extremely low. Jon says that the infrastructure would meaningfully reduce the probability of a bad outcome. But that’s not clear at all. The probability is already very low and so it can’t be reduced very much.

The Cole Allen case was not such an incident. He was stopped by the Secret Service employees who were doing their job.

But the one sure thing is that the measures Jon proposes would carry recurring costs. The three main categories would be: (1) the cost of hiring people to run the system; (2) passengers’ loss of time; and (3) passengers’ loss of freedom to travel. Those costs would be borne every day.

Let’s consider each in turn. Having a comprehensive system of baggage and passenger checks would require hiring thousands of employees. That’s not cheap. Let’s say that the government could keep the number at a thousand, which I think is unrealistically low. The employees would cost the government an average of at least $100,000 annually, inclusive of benefits. Right there, that’s $100 million. In the federal government’s grand scheme of things, that’s a small number but remember that the way we got to a federal budget deficit of about $2 trillion was with thousands of special “small number” programs.

The loss of valuable time for millions of passengers would also be substantial. In 2024, Amtrak had 32.8 million passengers. If the Amtrak version of TSA were implemented, a reasonable estimate is that the average amount of time to get through the screen would be 20 minutes. If the average passenger had a time value of even $30 an hour, which is probably an underestimate, the average loss for a passenger would be $10. [1/3 of an hour times $30 per hour.] So the overall cost to passengers from lost time would be over $300 million per year.

Finally, and most important, is the loss of freedom. The federal government has already ended our freedom to fly on commercial airlines without government permission. Extending that regulation to railroads would further reduce our freedom to travel.

Also, I should not let go unanswered this claim that Jon Harley makes:

Airports now rely on multiple layers of screening, including identification checks, baggage scans, and physical screening of passengers. Each layer contributes to reducing the probability of a successful security breach. The combined effect is a system that deters and detects threats more effectively than a single measure could achieve.

Every sentence in the above paragraph is true. But they give the impression that TSA is highly effective and competent. The reality is that when the system is tested, it fails dramatically. Here’s what ChatGPT tells me:

In covert tests, TSA has done poorly. The best-known result was in 2015, when DHS “Red Team” testers reportedly got mock explosives or banned weapons through checkpoints in 67 of 70 tests, a 95% failure rate. ABC reported that undercover investigators were able to smuggle mock explosives or weapons through checkpoints in 95% of trials; RAND’s Brian Michael Jenkins summarized the same result as TSA failing to detect 67 of 70 weapons or fake explosives. (bold in original)

The likely result of the measures Jon Hartley favors would be a relatively ineffective bureaucracy that itself is costly, that costs passengers, and that reduces freedom.