Summer is almost here and many Americans are worried they won’t be able to take a vacation. The cost of airfare alone is up a whopping 18% over the same time in 2025.
Flying to the beach or Disney World has become unaffordable for many middle-class families and the future looks bleak. Spirit Airlines, a major budget air carrier, canceled all flights and announced on May 2 that it’s going out of business, leaving fliers stranded with fewer low-cost options.
Spirit’s demise is the direct fault of the Biden administration, which killed a business deal that would have saved the airline. They were cheered on by key Democrats who need to be held accountable for their economic malpractice.
In 2022, Spirit and JetBlue announced they planned to merge into a new airline. The carrier would have combined the best of both businesses, leveraging JetBlue’s global scale in service of Spirit’s low prices.
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Not only that, the deal would have created a budget competitor to the so-called Big Four — Delta, Southwest, American and United — driving down prices across the airline industry. Advantage: mom and pop flier.
More competition almost always equates to lower prices. Yet the Biden administration would spend the next two years harassing JetBlue and Spirit, blocking their merger because they decided the resulting company would be too big.
It takes a lot of nerve for a $7 trillion federal government to complain about a $3.8 billion business agreement, but then this was increasingly the norm in Washington. Helmed by left-wing radical Lina Khan at the Federal Trade Commission and then-Attorney General Merrick Garland and then-Assistant Attorney General for the Antitrust Division Jonathan Kanter at the Department of Justice, the feds’ standard for antitrust enforcement was shifting from “is this bad for the consumer?” to “are we in a mood this morning?”
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At one point, Khan and Biden had 40% of the companies on the S&P market cap under investigation. It was this arbitrary anti-business mentality that ultimately killed the Spirit-JetBlue merger. The Biden team convinced a liberal judge to rule against the deal and that was that.
After the ruling, Garland boasted that the merger “would have caused tens of millions of travelers to face higher fares and fewer choices.” Reads a bit differently now that Spirit Airlines is dead, doesn’t it?
It wasn’t just Garland. Pete Buttigieg, who served as Biden’s secretary of Transportation, bragged about joining the harassment campaign against Spirit and JetBlue, saying he was “supporting the DOJ’s lawsuit” as well as “using our own authorities.”
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Democratic state attorneys general also fought the merger tooth and nail, with Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser going so far as to call the successful challenge of the JetBlue/Spirit merger a one of the “guideposts on the road” for state enforcers to follow in the future.
And, of course, Democrat Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren tweeted that Biden’s lackeys “were right to stand up for consumers and fight against runaway airline consolidation.”
In fact, it was the merger that was anti-consolidation by creating a new challenger to the Big Four. It was the merger that was pro-consumer by spurring competition and lowering airfares.
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And it was the merger that would have kept Spirit Airlines alive, saving 17,000 jobs.
Only eight months after the JetBlue-Spirit deal was blocked, Spirit announced it was filing for bankruptcy. It would do so again less than a year later.
Now, not only is Spirit gone, JetBlue could be next. The company has been struggling financially since the merger was blocked, with one estimate placing JetBlue’s odds of filing for bankruptcy this year at “greater than 75 percent.”
As for summer vacationers, data from Cirium Analytics estimates that Spirit’s budget pricing helped lower airfares by 14%. Meaning the cost of flying is about to surge, again.
Such bedlam at the airport lies at the doorstep of Democrats, who see government bureaucrats as an enlightened caste able to better manage the lives of businesses and consumers. To them, antitrust is just another tool to be wielded by these benevolent overseers.
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The Spirit fiasco shows how wrong they are. What Buttigieg, Garland and Khan really gave us was less competition, fewer options for consumers, higher prices, fewer jobs and more economic power concentrated in established companies.
Hopefully, the Trump administration uses this moment to institute a course correction.
The White House should use this moment in time to have a heart to heart with the lawyers and bureaucrats inside the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission, instructing them to only interfere in future mergers that pose clear demonstrable harms to consumers and the competitive marketplace.
It came too late to save Spirit, but the time is now to consign Democrat economics to the dustbin of history. Spirit Airlines — to say nothing of hard-working American families — deserved better.
