Seventeen thousand workers are out of a job. Thousands of travelers are stranded. The United States just witnessed its first major airline collapse in nearly a quarter-century.
The media will tell you this is a story about jet fuel prices. It isn’t. It’s a story about what happens when the federal government blocks deals it has no business blocking and then acts surprised when the wreckage piles up.
In 2024, Spirit sought a merger with JetBlue as a lifeline. Was Spirit a perfectly run airline? No. It had filed for bankruptcy twice and was carrying real structural problems. But the merger was its legitimate last shot.
Neither carrier was a major player. Neither posed any serious threat to competition. The Biden DOJ sued to block it anyway, led by FTC Chair Lina Khan and CFPB Director Rohit Chopra, the latter being the brainchild of Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), who has never met a market she didn’t want to strangle.
Jessica Melugin of the Competitive Enterprise Institute warned at the time:
“Blocking a merger of smaller competitors trying to combine resources and scale up to compete with the top four airlines makes little sense. It risks making both Spirit and JetBlue less able to compete… and ultimately leaving the airline industry less competitive, harming consumers.”
Senator Warren, one of the masterminds of blocking the merger, was out this week, blaming “spiking fuel prices from Trump’s war” as the nail in the coffin.
This is the same Elizabeth Warren who celebrated the merger block in 2024, as the Community Note ironically pointed out, tweeting:
Of course, media outlets like the AP didn’t even mention Elizabeth Warren and all her liberal pals and gave them cover.
A Biden win for flyers. Seventeen thousand people just lost their jobs. How’s that win looking now?
Yes, jet fuel costs have nearly doubled since conflict broke out with Iran. Analysts called it “the final nail in the coffin.”
But coffins require a body first. The Biden DOJ put the body there. The fuel crisis just closed the lid.
As for the bailout: Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy was right to call it “good money after bad.” He also immediately went to Twitter to explain how they would help those affected by the airline’s collapse.
The Trump administration inherited this mess. Taxpayers have no obligation to subsidize the consequences of the last administration’s regulatory malpractice.
The bottom line: markets work when you let them. Block the tools companies use to adapt, and you don’t protect anyone. You just guarantee the outcome you claimed to be preventing.
Spirit announced its wind-down “with great disappointment.”
That disappointment belongs at the feet of the regulators who caused it.
The last comparable shutdown came after September 11, a catastrophe nobody could have prevented. This one was a choice.
They made it. We’re all paying for it.
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