Did Democrats Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg doom the JetBlue, Spirit Airlines merger in 2022?

Ultra low-cost carrier Spirit Airlines shut down May 2, citing rising jet fuel prices. The Trump administration, which had floated bailing out the airline, blamed the previous administration, saying Democrats blocked a deal that could have saved the company.

"This is just more of the mess we inherited from the Biden administration," Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in a Fox News interview the following day. He pointed to a letter Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., sent to the Transportation Department in 2022, calling on the agency to oppose a proposed merger between JetBlue and Spirit Airlines.

Bessent said former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg was also against the merger.

"If JetBlue had merged with Spirit, we would have all these jobs that were lost yesterday," Bessent said. "The reason we were here was because … the Biden administration opposed the merger. We shouldn’t have been here in the first place."

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy echoed Bessent during a Fox News interview a few days later. 

"This story was not written because of the Iran war," he said. "This story was written years ago because of what Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, and the DOJ under Biden—what they did to prevent the merger from happening."

The airlines called off the merger agreement in 2024. A JetBlue executive cited a judge’s decision to block the merger in the Biden administration’s antitrust lawsuit against the deal as a reason for the termination, reports showed.

"With the ruling from the federal court and the Department of Justice’s continued opposition, the probability of getting the green light to move forward with the merger anytime soon is extremely low," JetBlue CEO Joanna Geraghty then said in an internal memo reported by Reuters.

Here’s what we know about what transpired when Spirit recently ended operations and when the merger was called off in 2022.

What did Spirit cite for the shutdown?

In its shutdown announcement, Spirit Airlines’ parent company cited a recent "increase in oil prices and other pressures."

"With no additional funding available to the Company, Spirit had no choice but to begin this wind-down," the statement said.

Spirit filed for bankruptcy in November 2024, then again in August 2025. The airline had not reported an annual profit since 2019.

In March, bondholders agreed to restructure the company, but the "sudden and sustained rise in fuel prices in recent weeks" led them to end operations instead. 

In records filed May 4, Spirit said "recent geopolitical events resulted in a massive and sustained increase in fuel prices." Fuel prices began to spike after the U.S. and Israel started the war against Iran in late February. 

An electronic check-in kiosk announces Spirit Airlines’ shutdown on May 2, 2026 at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport in Atlanta. (AP)

We asked Warren's office about the Trump administration's comments about her role in Spirit’s shuttering. As evidence that the failed merger did not cause the shutdown, a Warren spokesperson pointed PolitiFact to court documents and news articles showing that Spirit cited fuel costs for its shutdown and that Spirit did not show it needed the merger to remain operational.

We asked the Treasury Department about Bessent’s comments but did not hear back.

What happened with the proposed merger?

Spirit’s shutdown was the culmination of years of financial struggle that included other companies’ failed attempts to acquire the carrier.

In February 2022, Spirit and Frontier entered into a merger agreement, a legal document detailing how the combination of two companies would be carried out. In April 2022, JetBlue made an unsolicited $3.6 billion bid. Spirit rejected that offer in May and maintained its merger agreement with Frontier. Spirit told JetBlue that a merger likely wouldn’t clear antitrust hurdles because of JetBlue’s involvement in another antitrust lawsuit. JetBlue updated its bid in June 2022, and the following month, Spirit announced that it would terminate its merger agreement with Frontier and entered into a merger agreement with JetBlue. 

The proposed Spirit-JetBlue merger would have created the country’s fifth-largest airline, in an industry where the top four airlines — American, Delta, United and Southwest — already accounted for 80% of U.S. air travel.

In March 2023, Biden’s Justice Department and other parties filed a civil antitrust lawsuit seeking to block JetBlue from acquiring Spirit, arguing the move would lead to "higher fares and fewer options."

In January 2024, a court found JetBlue and Spirit’s proposed merger unlawful and in violation of antitrust law. Judge William Young, a federal judge at the U.S. District Court of Massachusetts nominated by former President Ronald Reagan, ruled that the merger would "harm cost-conscious travelers who rely on Spirit’s low fares."

JetBlue and Spirit ended the merger agreement two months later.

What role did Warren and Buttigieg play in blocking the merger?

Warren opposed both Frontier’s and JetBlue’s proposed mergers with Spirit. 

A group of Democratic Congress members, including Warren, wrote a letter in March 2022 to then-Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter and Buttigieg regarding Frontier’s proposed acquisition of Spirit.

That September, Warren asked the Transportation Department to assess whether the proposed JetBlue and Spirit merger would be inconsistent with public interest, and to block it if so.

In March 2023, Buttigieg said the Transportation Department supported the Justice Department’s antitrust lawsuit to block the Spirit-JetBlue merger. 

"We plan to deny the JetBlue-Spirit request for an exemption on their merger deal," Buttigieg wrote on X.

When JetBlue and Spirit ended their merger agreement, Warren said in a March 2024 X post that the Justice Antitrust Division and the Transportation Department "were right to stand up for consumers and fight against runaway airline consolidation."

"This is a Biden win for flyers!" she wrote.

After news of Spirit’s closure broke, Warren called, "spiking fuel prices from Trump’s war" the "nail in the coffin" for Spirit. 

"JetBlue merger failed because a judge, appointed by Ronald Reagan, said the deal was illegal," Warren said in an X post. "Republicans are desperate to shift blame from higher costs hitting families."

Warren had previously argued that other deals deserved antitrust scrutiny, and she wasn’t mentioned in the judge’s decision. 

Young wrote in his 2024 decision, "Although Spirit is struggling, its executives testified that the airline had a long-term plan to return to profitability."