Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said Monday that Congress might need to sign off on the other airlines’ counterproposal, which would see the US government spend $2.5 billion to help a coalition of carriers also facing higher fuel costs from the Iran war.
“Why Spirit above everybody else?” Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, told Semafor. “I don’t get it, actually.”
It’s so far unclear whether Duffy thinks lawmakers would also need to greenlight the Spirit deal, which he’s also expressed concerns about. Either way, the preemptive resistance from a wide swath of conservatives could make it extraordinarily difficult for either plan to materialize.
“Right now, we can’t pass gas around here, much less a bill doing a Spirit deal,” said Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., who added that Commerce Secretary Howard “Lutnick is giving the president incredibly bad advice.”
The Commerce Department did not comment.
For many congressional Republicans who are still upset by previous government interventions in the private sector, the proposed airline takeover would be the latest affront — not least because it would mean taxpayer dollars propping up an otherwise failed business model. Kennedy and others questioned why the Trump administration would pursue a deal that private-sector players have rejected.
“Where does it end? I mean, next thing you know, we’ll be bailing out football teams. I’m not a big fan of it,” said Rep. Troy Nehls, R-Texas, a member of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee.
Spirit is currently struggling to emerge from its second bankruptcy after the Biden administration shut down a proposed merger with JetBlue. Even its GOP critics have joined the Trump administration in pointing the finger at the former president.
“If they had let that go through, then we wouldn’t be looking at a bailout right now,” Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., who chaired House Judiciary’s antitrust subpanel during the attempted merger, told Semafor.
Still, Massie made clear that he’s opposed to the latest Spirit proposal, calling it “rewarding failure.”
“What happens if they go bankrupt is, somebody buys their planes; somebody takes over their leases at the gates; and somebody hires their employees and their pilots who are trained,” he added. “But the shareholders who failed to address a bad business model lose out — and they should.”
Even lawmakers who work closely with airlines are reluctant to bless the government taking over part of Spirit. Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kan., the Commerce Committee’s aviation subpanel chair, said he’s been coordinating with the airline industry but is “concerned about further government involvement in other businesses.
“We don’t want to lose a carrier. But it just philosophically troubles me about this endeavor to put money into a private corporation,” Moran said.
