Spirit Airlines shut down for good on May 2, 2026, canceling every flight, closing customer service, and putting 17,000 employees out of work in a single Saturday morning. And one of Joe Biden's own former aides is now asking whether the administration's decision to block Spirit's merger with JetBlue was worth it.
Neera Tanden, a former Biden aide, posted on X what amounted to a rare public second-guessing of the Biden-era Department of Justice. Her message landed the same day Spirit's restructuring page went live with a blunt company announcement: the airline that had spent 33 years pioneering ultra-low-cost air travel was done.
The question Tanden raised is one that 17,000 newly unemployed workers and their families already know the answer to. The Biden DOJ, under Attorney General Merrick Garland, moved to block the proposed JetBlue-Spirit merger. The Department of Transportation, under then-Secretary Pete Buttigieg, piled on. And Spirit Airlines, left without its lifeline, spiraled into exactly the kind of collapse that merger supporters warned about.
The company's own announcement, posted on its restructuring website, left nothing to interpretation. Breitbart News reported the airline's statement in full:
"It is with great disappointment that on May 2, 2026, Spirit Airlines started an orderly wind-down of our operations, effectively immediately. To our Guests: all flights have been cancelled, and customer service is no longer available."
Spirit also said it was "proud of the impact of our ultra-low-cost model on the industry over the last 33 years and had hoped to serve our Guests for many years to come." That hope died when the federal government decided it knew better than the companies and their customers what the airline market needed.
By Saturday morning, 17,000 people found themselves without jobs. No phased transition. No soft landing. Just a company announcement and a dead website.
Tanden's post on X stopped short of outright condemnation, but the tone was unmistakable. She wrote:
"Given the news today that Spirit Airlines is shuttering and thousands of people are losing their jobs, I think we should honestly assess whether the Garland DoJ stopping the JetBlue merger with Spirit Airlines was the right call. Perhaps it was, but any analysis must consider as part of the equation the loss to so many families to decide."
Read that again. A former Biden aide, not a Republican, not a free-market think tank, not a JetBlue lobbyist, is publicly questioning whether Garland's DOJ made the right call. She's asking the Biden team's own loyalists to "honestly assess" the wreckage.
The hedge is there. "Perhaps it was." But the framing tells you where Tanden's instincts land. When you have to beg your own side to weigh 17,000 lost jobs "as part of the equation," the equation wasn't working to begin with.
The Biden-era DOJ developed a pattern of aggressive action that drew scrutiny well beyond antitrust. Newly released memos showed Garland was briefed on Jack Smith's push to override legal protections in the Trump probe, a window into how the department operated under his leadership.
The DOJ didn't act alone. Breitbart News also reported that in a 2023 CNN interview, former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg bragged about how the Department of Transportation was getting involved in opposing the potential JetBlue-Spirit merger.
That's worth sitting with. A cabinet secretary went on television to take credit for helping block a deal that, three years later, left an entire airline's workforce on the street. No one in the Biden administration appears to have considered what would happen to Spirit if the merger fell through and the company couldn't survive on its own.
Or maybe they considered it and decided it didn't matter. Either way, the workers are the ones paying.
The broader pattern of Biden-era federal agencies acting on political priorities rather than practical outcomes extended across departments. The FBI opened probes into Republican lawmakers even after prosecutors privately dismissed the underlying allegations, a reminder that institutional overreach was not limited to antitrust enforcement.
The Biden administration came into office with an explicitly aggressive posture toward corporate mergers. That posture had ideological roots, a belief that consolidation is inherently bad, that big is always worse, and that government regulators can engineer better market outcomes than the market itself.
Spirit Airlines is the test case for that theory. And the theory failed.
Spirit was already struggling before the merger was blocked. The JetBlue deal would have given it a path forward, a buyer willing to absorb its routes, its planes, and its people. The DOJ said no. The Department of Transportation cheered. And Spirit was left to fend for itself in a market where it couldn't compete.
Now the airline is gone. Its 33-year run is over. Its customers have fewer choices. And its workers, the flight attendants, mechanics, gate agents, and ground crews, are looking for new jobs in an industry that isn't exactly flush with openings.
The DOJ's broader conduct during the Biden years raised questions that went far beyond airline mergers. Memos revealed coordination between the Biden DOJ, Fani Willis, and the Jan. 6 committee in the effort to prosecute Trump, a pattern of institutional behavior that critics said reflected political motivation rather than dispassionate enforcement.
Not Merrick Garland. Not Pete Buttigieg. Not the DOJ lawyers who filed the antitrust challenge. Not the policy advisers who cheered from the sidelines.
The consequences fall on 17,000 workers who woke up Saturday morning to find their employer gone. They fall on travelers in smaller markets who relied on Spirit's low fares. They fall on the families Tanden mentioned, the ones she now wants her own side to "consider as part of the equation."
That's the recurring problem with government-by-ideology. The people who make the decisions never bear the costs. The regulators move on to new jobs and new causes. The workers move on to unemployment lines.
It is worth noting that the same Biden White House that empowered this DOJ also hailed Fani Willis as an "icon" while she built her case against Trump, a reminder of how political allegiance, not results, drove the administration's internal culture.
Tanden asked for an "honest" assessment. Here's one: the Biden DOJ blocked a merger that would have saved a company and preserved 17,000 jobs, and it did so in the name of an antitrust philosophy that treated corporate consolidation as a greater threat than mass unemployment.
Spirit Airlines said it had "hoped to serve our Guests for many years to come." The federal government made sure that didn't happen. And now, years later, the people who made that call are asking, politely, carefully, with plenty of hedging, whether maybe they got it wrong.
The connection between aggressive DOJ action and real-world harm is not a new theme. Memos revealed the Biden DOJ invited Fani Willis to apply for a $2 million grant while she pursued Trump, another case where the department's priorities appeared to serve political goals rather than the public interest.
Seventeen thousand families don't need an "honest assessment." They need a paycheck. The Biden DOJ made sure they won't be getting it from Spirit Airlines.
When your own allies start asking whether you made the right call, the answer is usually no.
