The Transportation Security Administration's facial recognition program is voluntary, for now. If you don't want the federal government to scan your face each time you fly via a program potentially* going nationwide in 2023, you are, at least in theory, allowed to decline.
But eventually, TSA Administrator David Pekoske admitted in mid-March, biometric screening will cease to be optional. The TSA wants to make sure "that this system has as little friction as it possibly can," Pekoske said, and, apparently, assertion of a basic constitutional right to (some remnant of) privacy is just too much friction.
