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The learned helplessness of Pete Buttigieg
Section 41712(a) or bust.
The apocalyptic airline meltdown over the Christmas break stranded thousands of Americans, ruining their vacations and costing them a fortune in unexpected fees. It wasn’t just Southwest Airlines’ meltdown, either — as stranded fliers sought alternatives, airlines like AA raised the price of some domestic coach tickets to over $10,000.
This didn’t come out of nowhere. Southwest’s growth strategy has seen the airlines add more planes and routes without a comparable investment in back-end systems, including crew scheduling systems. SWA’s unions have spent years warning the public that their employer’s IT infrastructure was one crisis away from total collapse.
But successive administrations have failed to act on those warnings. Under Obama and Trump, the DoT was content to let “the market” discipline the monopoly carriers, though both administrations were happy to wave through anticompetitive mergers that weakened the power of markets to provide that discipline. Obama waved through the United/Continental merger and the Southwest/AirTran merger, while Trump waved through Virgin/Alaska.
While these firms were allowed to privatize their gains, Uncle Sucker paid for their losses. Trump handed the airlines $54 billion in covid relief, which the airlines squandered on stock buybacks and executive bonuses, while gutting their own employee rosters with early retirement buyouts:
Incredibly, the airlines got even worse under the Biden administration. In the first six months of 2022, US airlines cancelled more flights than they had in all of 2021, while the airlines increased their profits by 45% — and kept it, rather than using it to pay back the $10b in unpaid refunds they owed to fliers:
Dozens of state attorneys general — Republicans and Democrats — wrote to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, begging him to take action on the airlines. After months without action, they wrote again, just days before…
