Taking a bus, a train, or a ferry has long offered a level of convenience that air travel can’t. Arrive two hours before a domestic flight, and it can still be a stretch making it before the gate closes; show up at New York's Penn Station 15 minutes before your departure time (to minimize how long you have to stay in that dystopian nightmare of a building), and you’ll have enough time left over to grab a slice. That ease of travel that we gain from not having the intense—and, at times, bafflingly inefficient—TSA oversight found in airports may soon be a thing of the past, though, as a new bill making its way through Congress seeks to expand TSA’s reach onto buses, trains, and ferries, known collectively as surface transportation.

The bipartisan bill introduced last week by Senator John Thune (R-SD) and Bill Nelson (D-FL) would require that the TSA assess terrorism risk at all surface transportation facilities—bus depots, train stations, ports—and implement new security models based on those risks. According to website The Hill, the lawmakers cited concerns about whether the TSA is adequately identifying security risks in non-airport transport hubs. According to a report from the Office of Inspector General, the agency is not. Last year, 80 percent of the TSA's $7.4 billion budget was spent at airports, while only two percent went to surface-level transportation. “TSA lacks an intelligence-driven, risk-based security strategy that informs security and resource decisions across all transportation modes,” reads the report, observing a security approach “designed for the aviation mode and chiefly for air passenger screening.” Thune, Nelson, and co. want to change this with legislation that would see train operators gaining access to TSA’s terrorist watch list, more rigorous screening of passengers and employees, and an uptick in TSA canine units at stations and ports.