Anyone who travels through Pensacola’s airport knows that the Transportation Security Administration’s screening process there is broken. For frequent flyers who use that airport regularly (like me), it stands out as a consistently subpar experience.

TSA is either unwilling or unable to perform its missions efficiently and effectively, often leading to obscenely long lines that create safety issues because they spill into areas not designed to queue waiting passengers.

Screeners also appear to have trouble operating the new high-tech scanning machines with the accompanying backups, extra bag checks, and delays not found in other airports.

TSA advises travelers to arrive at the airport at least two hours before their flights to account for the long lines, but it fails to note that they don’t open the lines at least two hours before the earliest flights depart—wreaking havoc for those trying to catch those flights.

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As the Pensacola News Journal recently recounted, TSA runs things so poorly that Pensacola’s mayor even asked members of Congress to intervene because TSA refused to provide sufficient staff. After their intervention, TSA agreed to temporarily provide more screeners, but only through the end of July. After that, everyone anticipates the long lines and unnecessary delays will return.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Instead of begging TSA officials for better staffing, training, and customer service, Pensacola should fire TSA and privatize screening operations at our airport.

Sound absurd? Far from it.

Twenty-one current airports have already done it. Some are similar in size to Pensacola’s airport, and some are much larger, like San Francisco’s airport. At least three other Florida airports—Key West, Orlando Sanford, and Sarasota-Bradenton—currently utilize private screeners. TSA’s Screening Partnership Program allows airports to opt out of using TSA screeners and to instead hire private parties to do the job.

Studies have shown that airports participating in this program have greater efficiency and better customer satisfaction. A 2011 study by the U.S. House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee found that private screeners at San Francisco’s airport screened 65 percent more passengers per screener than TSA screeners who manned the security checkpoints at LAX, Los Angeles’s primary airport.

The private screeners also would not likely be impacted by government shutdowns and other federal labor issues like TSA screeners would be.

Ironically, because TSA functions as both the regulator and the regulated entity, it stands to lose if it approves airports’ requests to privatize screening operations. That’s likely why the process is notoriously slow and difficult to undertake. In fact, the Obama Administration’s TSA even tried to kill the privatization program until Congress passed legislation requiring the agency to restore it.

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While TSA studies claim that its screeners generally perform as well as the private screeners for roughly the same cost, other government agencies—like the Government Accountability Office—have cast doubt on the validity of those studies, or at least the conclusions drawn from them.

If Pensacola opts to privatize security screenings, there would likely be some transitional period with the associated inefficiencies when the TSA turns over operations to the private screening company.

Still, if this is an option, why aren’t our local elected leaders using it instead of being held hostage to the whims—and mercy—of the TSA?

If local leaders request to privatize screening operations, and TSA delays a decision on the request or denies it, that’s an issue for our members of Congress to examine.

And let’s be honest, does anyone anticipate that private screeners would be worse at efficiently screening passengers than the current TSA screeners?

It’s past time for our local elected leaders to pursue this privatization path if they’re serious about making Pensacola’s airport one of the best in the nation.

Grounding TSA will clear the runway for that goal to become a reality.