The TSA fired off a blunt social-media reminder that a Costco membership card will never clear you through airport security, a sign of just how confused travelers remain two months after the Real ID mandate took effect.
The Transportation Security Administration posted the clarification on its social media accounts, addressing what it called persistent misinformation about what counts as acceptable identification at checkpoints. The agency did not hold back, mixing humor with a firm warning that no warehouse-club card, no matter how beloved its food court, qualifies as a substitute for a federally compliant ID.
The post landed weeks after the Real ID requirement officially went into effect on May 7, 2025, a deadline that itself came two decades after Congress passed the Real ID Act in 2005, based on recommendations from the 9/11 Commission. Repeated delays, the most recent driven by COVID-19 pandemic backlogs in 2022, pushed the enforcement date out again and again, giving Americans years of extra runway to get compliant. Many still did not.
In April and early May, DMV offices across the country were overwhelmed with long lines as procrastinating travelers rushed to obtain Real ID-compliant licenses before the cutoff. Fox News reported that the crush of last-minute applicants created backlogs at state motor vehicle centers, compounding the confusion about what identification would and would not work at the airport.
That confusion apparently did not end once the requirement kicked in. Enough travelers, or enough social-media commenters, floated the idea that a Costco membership card could serve as a valid ID that the TSA felt compelled to respond publicly.
The U.S. Sun reported on the TSA's post, which read:
"We love hotdogs & rotisserie chickens as much as the next person but please stop telling people their Costco card counts as a Real ID because it absolutely does not."
The tone was playful. The underlying message was not. Travelers who show up at a checkpoint without an accepted form of ID now face real consequences, starting with a $45 fee.
Under the TSA's ConfirmID verification system, passengers who arrive without proper identification can still clear security, but only after paying $45 for an identity check. The agency says the fee covers IT and administrative costs for the verification process. That fee was originally set at $18 before being raised to its current level, though the TSA has not publicly detailed when the increase took effect or under what specific authority.
House Republicans have taken notice. Language in the latest iteration of the annual Homeland Security budget states that TSA has "no valid statutory authority" to collect the fee, and GOP lawmakers are pushing to ban it outright. The specific committee members behind the provision and the bill's current status remain unclear from available reporting, but the objection cuts to a straightforward principle: a federal agency should not be charging citizens money without explicit congressional authorization.
For travelers who left their Real ID at home or never obtained one, the accepted alternatives remain limited but clear. U.S. passports and passport cards work. So do permanent resident cards, border crossing cards, and foreign government-issued passports. Breitbart noted that the Real ID Act was passed in 2005 but spent two decades mired in implementation delays, a timeline that makes the current wave of public confusion harder to excuse. The New York Post reported that Department of Defense IDs for active and retired military personnel also remain valid at checkpoints.
Congress passed the Real ID Act in response to the 9/11 Commission's finding that hijackers had exploited weak identification standards. The law set minimum security requirements for state-issued driver's licenses and ID cards used for federal purposes, including boarding domestic flights. But enforcement kept getting pushed back, first by states that balked at compliance costs, then by the pandemic, which slowed DMV operations nationwide.
By the time the May 7 deadline arrived, the requirement had been delayed so many times that a segment of the traveling public apparently stopped taking it seriously. The Costco-card episode is a symptom of that broader failure to communicate urgency. When a federal agency has to publicly beg people to stop pretending a warehouse membership card is a government-issued ID, something went wrong long before the checkpoint.
The TSA, for its part, has leaned into lighter social-media engagement in recent months. The agency told The U.S. Sun it had "exclusively revealed" the six most bizarre items found at security checkpoints, part of an apparent effort to build public awareness through viral content. Whether that approach helps clear up genuine confusion or simply generates clicks is an open question.
Twenty years to prepare, and the government still could not get the message across clearly enough to prevent a Costco card from becoming a punchline. Travelers deserve better, and Congress is right to ask why the TSA is charging them $45 for a problem Washington created.