H.R. 8645, Improved Screening for Veterans and Passengers with Disabilities Act

H.R. 8645 would waive the fee for severely disabled veterans, as defined in the bill, who wish to enroll in the PreCheck program operated by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). PreCheck expedites the security screening process for commercial airline travelers and must be renewed every five years. Eligible veterans would need to satisfy the applicable security requirements for participating in PreCheck, including a background check. 

About 20 million people (or 7 percent of the adult population) are enrolled in PreCheck. The fee ranges from $78 to $85 for new enrollees and from $69 to $78 for renewals, depending on how the traveler applies for PreCheck. Those amounts cover the cost of the background check. Using information from the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), CBO estimates that about 325,000 veterans would meet the qualifications for the fee waiver. 

CBO expects that some of those veterans would take advantage of the fee waiver to enroll in PreCheck for the first time and that eligible veterans who already have PreCheck benefits would reenroll using the waiver sometime over the next five years. CBO has no specific data on disabled veterans enrolled in PreCheck, but we assume that disabled veterans enroll at the same rate as the general population. On that basis, CBO estimates that around 7 percent of disabled veterans (or about 24,000 veterans) are already enrolled in the program and would reenroll at no cost over the next five years.