At airports across the United States, the Transportation Security Administration is now letting passengers in the standard screening line keep their shoes on.
First noticed by flyers over the July Fourth holiday weekend, the change was officially announced Tuesday by Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem at a news conference.
Ending the TSA's shoes-off policy "will drastically decrease passenger wait times at our TSA checkpoints, leading to a more pleasant and efficient passenger experience," Noem said in a statement.
A "multi-layered security approach" at U.S. airports has rendered shoe removal unnecessary, Noem added, due to improved technology and measures such as the recently finalized REAL ID requirement for passengers.
The end of the shoe-removal rule, first reported by the travel newsletter Gate Access, appears to have undergone a soft launch at select airports on Friday, before rolling out more widely this week, with numerous travel bloggers and social media accounts posting about the development on Monday.
Now, with Noem's announcement, the TSA has officially abandoned its nearly 20-year commitment to being a no-shoes household.
Passengers in the agency's standard screening line have had to remove shoes to go through airport security checkpoints since 2006. The measure was enacted in response to an incident in which, as the New York Times explains, a "terrorist tried to detonate an explosive in his shoe while aboard an American Airlines flight from Paris to Miami."
Mind you, that thwarted 2001 attempt was the sole (pun intended) example of a try at shoe bombing reported by airport security officials, and the TSA never supplied any evidence that removing footwear at checkpoints had any effect on preventing further threats.
What's more, passengers enrolled in the TSA PreCheck program haven't had to remove their shoes at airports in years. In fact, that has been one of the chief selling points of the $80 prescreening service.
Which raises the question, as Gate Access writer Caleb Harmon-Marshall points out to the New York Times, of whether people will still pay for PreCheck when one of its best perks—the ability to keep shoes on at airport checkpoints—is expanded to travelers in the standard line as well.
An earlier version of this story has been updated with new information.