TSA Charged Passenger Three $45 REAL ID Fees In 30 Minutes — One Was Supposed To Cover 10 Days, Then Came “No Refunds”

TSA now charges airline passengers $45 if they don’t have a REAL ID to confirm their identity. That one charge is supposed to be valid for 10 days, so on many itineraries you pay it once for a roundtrip. However, a Delta customer reports being charged by the agency 3 times in less than half an hour. I’d appreciate some help from @Delta and @AskTSA. My trip home ended w/confusion, an embarrassing experience, & 3 unexpected $45 charges that left my bank account nearly 0. I’m just asking for someone to review & make it right❤️💙✈️ #CustomerService #Travel #Delta #TSA pic.twitter.com/VdfofpVP9k — 🍀Ms. Jackson🍀 (@caramelkit10) August 3, 2026 Because this is the government, providing exactly the kind of service you’d expect from TSA, their response was “TSA doesn’t provide refunds” – they aren’t even willing to look into how this happened, or whether this was a mistake, just ‘if we take your money, we keep your money.’ TSA doesn't provide refunds for the TSA ConfirmID fee. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and appreciate your understanding. We recommend working with your financial institution for assistance regarding any additional charges. — AskTSA (@AskTSA) August 3, 2026 Ironically when Southwest, Frontier, and JetBlue were caught keeping money they’d charged passengers that was supposed to go to TSA, the agency sued. TSA announced the fee at $18 just in November, but raised it to $45 in December – before it even went into effect in February. In the Federal Register notice making this change they claimed that ConfirmID operations actually cost them $19.50 per passenger (the fee is just supposed to recoup their costs for the program) but $25.50 per passenger more because they wanted additional CT baggage scanners in standard security lanes at high traffic airports in states with low REAL ID compliance. In other words, it’s an equipment fund and they can self-budget any projects they say they want for ‘states with low REAL ID compliance’, usurping congressional tax and spend powers. The fee itself, by the way, has shaky legal justification. They didn’t even promulgate this as a standard rule with notice and comment. Instead the agency argued it has unilateral authority to ‘just do this’ on its own based on the 2006 Department of Homeland Security Appropriations Act (49 U.S.C. 114) that authorizes the agency to impose a fee for any “registered traveler program.” In other words, TSA said their authority to recoup costs for PreCheck lets them impose any costs they choose on passengers by creating a program that they call a ‘registered traveler program’ completely unrelated to what Congress intended (or what the cited law is about). The law also says the fee can’t exceed the agency’s costs, but they’ve drawn a circle around costs that are tenuously related at best. ID requirements to fly began as a ‘do something’ policy after the explosion of TWA flight 800. President Clinton demanded to be able to immediately announce new airline security measures, and told his National Security Council team to come up with some. The US government maintains targeting lists and airlines are required to check passengers against it before allowing them to fly. They maintain other lists that trigger increased security screening and potentially harassment. Without ID, those lists are useless because someone on them can fly under a different identity. But the lists themselves contain significant garbage information. You can get on the list just by being related to someone (guilt by association) suspected of terrorist involvement. Or just traveling to the wrong country at the wrong time. An army veteran and civilian military contractor was placed on the list for having visited Yemen in 2009. Or because someone at the FBI checked the wrong box on a form by mistake, or failed to check a box by mistake or in retaliation for refusing to become an FBI informant. We don’t even know much more about what goes into these determinations because the government has claimed their secret sauce is a ‘state secret’. Targeting lists aren’t only used by the government, and they’re not secure. In fact the U.S. distributes the list to over 1400 private organizations and shares it with other governments. It’s used for purposes beyond national security. It appears that federal government lawyers have perjured themselves claiming that the list was not shared. It’s even given to “police forces at private universities, hospital security staff” and it’s not clear what, if any, restrictions there are on how the information is used. Meanwhile the government “adds hundreds of thousands of names to the list every year.” There are now nearly two million names on terrorism watch lists and the entire list was leaked online via a Bahrain server. Charging people $45 is a burden on the right to travel. Charging people 3 times the published fee and stating ‘TSA doesn’t offer refunds’ is an abomination. Travel is a fundamental right. The right to move freely between states is a well-established principle in U.S. law affirmed by several Supreme Court cases under the Privileges and Immunities Clause and Commerce Clause. Crandall v. Nevada (1868) struck down a Nevada law imposing a tax on individuals leaving the state because states couldn’t restrict citizen movement across state lines. United States v. Guest (1966) held that there is a Constitutional right to travel from state to state. Shapiro v. Thompson (1969) held that states could not impose residency requirements to restrict welfare benefits. The Court found that the right to travel includes the right to migrate to another state and receive equal treatment as a resident. Saenz v. Roe (1999) struck down a California law that limited welfare benefits for new residents. The Court delineated three components of the right to travel: The right to enter and leave another state; the right to be treated as a welcome visitor rather than a hostile outsider; the right to become a resident of any state and enjoy the same privileges and immunities as other residents. The government wants to impinge on that right with positive identity checks. If it does this, there shouldn’t be a further, specific cost imposed on the individual seeking to exercise their right. If identity checks are a collective benefit, then the cost should be shared collectively. Taxing travelers with extra fees amounts to punishment for not having the government’s preferred form of identity documents. And these processes and fees should require authorization by Congress (the TSA’s ‘too cute by half’ excuse notwithstanding) and subject to proper notice and comment. The TSA is its own, unaccountable regulator. It fails repeatedly, and only sees its funding go up. It costs over $10 billion a year, fails 90% of the time, and the agency covers up its failures. What’s primarily protected us is that there aren’t actually active plots against aviation (as admitted by TSA itself), cockpits have been reinforced, and passengers would no longer sit idly by. The rest of it is largely theater by an agency that has never caught – or stopped – a terrorist. Topics on this page