Spirit Failed Long Before the JetBlue Merger Was Blocked
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- Spirit Airlines collapsed from rising costs, the wrong product mix, and United, Delta, and American offering a slightly better experience at the same low fare — not because the Biden administration blocked the JetBlue merger, the piece argues.
- JetBlue has lost money for six years and is now scaling back: paying pilots not to fly, incentivizing early retirement, shrinking the fleet below existing levels, and eliminating cities from its route map — meaning the merger wouldn't have kept Spirit's planes in the air.
- The Biden administration's more damaging antitrust move was suing to break up the American Airlines–JetBlue Northeast Alliance, a partnership the first Trump administration had approved; killing the NEA removed the strategic logic for any Spirit acquisition.
- The author labels the NEA lawsuit a "rule of law problem," arguing it meant government signoff in one administration could no longer be relied upon in the next, and calls the underlying antitrust theory flawed for ignoring consumer benefit.
- The Biden DOJ contradicted itself across cases: in the JetBlue-American fight it called JetBlue a "pro-passenger disruptor" who drives down prices, then in the Spirit case portrayed the same airline as a monopolist who would raise them.
- Any Spirit rescue lacks a legal basis, won't fix the airline's ongoing losses, and would push Frontier — Spirit's primary competitor — closer to collapse, while creating regulator conflicts for the government as Spirit's overseer.
Why it matters: The piece reframes the politically convenient 'Biden killed Spirit' narrative by identifying a more consequential but less-remembered antitrust action — the breakup of the JetBlue-American Northeast Alliance — that removed the strategic case for any Spirit rescue. Frontier, Spirit's primary low-cost competitor, now faces closer-to-brink conditions if the White House presses ahead with a bailout the author says has no legal basis.
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