Senator Tammy Duckworth is demanding that the TSA reverse its “shoes on” policy, calling it reckless and dangerous. The argument is familiar: if there is any vulnerability, no matter how small, we must close it.

While that is an understandable instinct, it is also a misguided one.

Calls To Bring Back TSA Shoe Removal Miss The Bigger Picture

Last year, the Transportation Security Administration quietly rolled back one of the most unpopular post-9/11 policies: requiring passengers to remove their shoes at airport checkpoints.

Predictably, travelers welcomed the change. Equally predictably, lawmakers are now pushing back.

Here is the letter from Senator Duckworth to Nguyen McNeil, a senior TSA official, in full:

I demand that you immediately rescind former Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem’s policy forcing the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to allow travelers to keep their shoes on at airport security screening checkpoints despite credible and disturbing reports that covert testing conducted during a performance audit identified serious findings with significant safety and security implications for the traveling public.

TSA’s policy of requiring all passengers to remove their shoes originated with the failed “Shoe Bomber” terrorist attack. This incident occurred on December 22, 2001, when Richard Reid attempted to detonate improvised explosive devices (IEDs) hidden in his shoes during a Miami-bound flight. Had Reid succeeded in detonating the IEDs concealed in his shoes, the explosives likely would have blown a hole in the fuselage and caused the plane to crash, killing all 197 passengers and the flight crew.

Secretary Noem’s decision to implement a shoes on policy on July 8, 2025, likely without meaningful consultation with TSA, was a reckless act. According to reporting by The Wall Street Journal, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Office of Inspector General (OIG) conducted covert testing that found certain TSA Advanced Imaging Technology full body scanners “can’t scan shoes”—leading DHS OIG to determine, “Noem’s policy move had inadvertently created a new security vulnerability in the system.”

According to DHS OIG, when investigators covertly tested the effectiveness of TSA’s airport checkpoint security screening at preventing threat items from being brought onto commercial aircraft, a significant finding was uncovered that warranted Inspector General Joseph Cuffari issuing a Seven-Day Letter on August 26, 2025, to Secretary Noem notifying the Secretary of its time-sensitive significant finding that required swift corrective action. Secretary Noem’s subsequent failure to direct DHS to engage DHS OIG on the substance of the Seven-Day Letter was outrageous, unacceptable and dangerous to the flying public.

Secretary Noem’s shoes on policy remains in effect—despite President Donald Trump publicly announcing the firing of Secretary Noem on March 5, 2026 (effective at the end of March). It is unclear, at best, whether DHS and TSA took any action to address the alarming security findings uncovered during covert field testing of TSA’s effectiveness at preventing dangerous items from being smuggled onto commercial aircraft.

Such inaction violates Federal law, Office of Management and Budget (OMB) guidance and DHS’s own directives requiring that TSA provide a Management Decision with planned corrective actions and target completion dates within 90 days after OIG’s final report is transmitted—in this case by January 30, 2026.

While under oath, you testified to Congress that you had read the DHS OIG final report in November 2025 and that you concurred with the findings and recommendations. Yet, it appears TSA not only failed to submit the Management Decision within 90 days of DHS OIG transmitting its final report but also has, to this day, still failed to comply with a critically important statutory requirement, OMB guidance and DHS directives.

Allowing a potentially catastrophic security deficiency to remain in place for seven months and counting betrays TSA’s mission. At a minimum, TSA’s failure to swiftly implement corrective action warrants the immediate withdrawal of Secretary Noem’s reckless and dangerous policy that increases the risk of a terrorist smuggling a dangerous item onto a flight.

Secretary Noem’s willingness to gamble the American people’s security in an unsuccessful attempt to boost her popularity was, and remains, a stunning failure of leadership—particularly following President Trump’s decision to launch an unconstitutional war of choice against Iran that DHS has determined, “is causing a heightened threat environment in the United States.”

I demand you immediately rescind the dangerous TSA policy that former Secretary Noem recklessly implemented, until the agency implements comprehensive corrective action and the DHS OIG tests and verifies that the updates effectively address the significant findings uncovered during covert field testing.

The core claim is simple: if scanners cannot detect threats in shoes, then shoes must come off.

It’s not ridiculous to question this policy. But that logic quickly breaks down.

TSA screening is not, and has never been, failsafe. Multiple audits over the years have shown that the agency routinely misses prohibited items at a non-trivial rate. If the standard is “eliminate every possible vulnerability,” then carry-on items and clothing should be banned…wouldn’t that be a spectacle?

Security Is About Risk, Not Perfection

The original shoe removal policy was a direct response to a very specific threat: Richard Reid’s failed attempt in 2001. But aviation security cannot be frozen in time around one incident from nearly a quarter century ago.

Technology has improved. Screening has evolved. And the threat landscape has changed. More importantly, the system is layered. Intelligence, passenger vetting, behavior detection, and physical screening all play a role. Fixating on a single vulnerability while ignoring the broader system misses the point.

There is a cost to every additional layer of screening. Can you imagine if during the latest TSA shutdown fiasco every  passenger had to also remove their shoes…it could have turned 4-hour wait times into 6-hour wait times.

Removing shoes slows down checkpoints, increases congestion, and introduces inefficiencies that can themselves create new risks when pressure is put on TSA agents to “hurry” through long queues. Longer lines mean more crowding in unsecured areas, the perfect vulnerability for an Iranian sleeper agent to detonate a weapon (as unpleasant as that is to even think about).

If the benefit of removing shoes is marginal, but the cost is significant, then the policy does not make sense. I don’t see the benefit.

CONCLUSION

The TSA missing prohibited items is not new. It has never been a perfect system, and it never will be.

The question is not whether there is risk, for there always is. The question is whether forcing millions of passengers to remove their shoes meaningfully reduces that risk.

Based on everything we know and after almost a year of the new policy being in place, the answer is no.

Bringing back the shoe requirement would simply make the process slower, more frustrating, and no more reliable than it already when looking at the big picture.

Are you in favor of restoring the rule that passengers must remove shoes before walking through an airport security checkpoint in the USA?

image: TSA

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