Except it's not gated by the tiny fee, but with the background check. Only those who are statistically very low risk will be approved (which indeed is most people -- by design).

> The answer is probably racism. Not everyone is allowed a pre-approval

Is it racist to know the fact that say, zero schoolteachers from Iowa with no history of travel to the Middle East have ever hijacked a plane, but quite a few people from Saudi Arabia and Iran, or who have contacts there, have? And to allow the teacher to bypass the whole mess? I'd say that's efficient.

The fee is quite obviously not material to anyone who can afford air travel anyway. It would be a more serious critique if the fee were say, $1,500 a year. But for a hundred bucks every few years, this is neither extortion, nor a burden. It's just paying the admin costs of the program, which means not using general fund money (everyone's taxes) to pay for background checks for rich business travelers. That's progressive.

And the alternative to this type of program would be the silliness where some random grandma or child gets invasively searched because "we have to be random."