Spirit Airlines ceased operations early Saturday, ending a 34-year run and leaving thousands of workers without jobs, and critics are pointing directly at Sen. Elizabeth Warren and the Biden administration for blocking the merger that might have kept the budget carrier alive.
The shutdown came after a proposed half-billion-dollar government bailout fell through. Within hours, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, Republican Sen. Bernie Moreno, economist Peter Schiff, and others laid responsibility at the feet of Warren and former Biden officials who fought to stop JetBlue Airways from acquiring Spirit in a deal valued at $3.8 billion.
Warren, for her part, blamed fuel prices and pointed to a federal judge's ruling. But the timeline tells a story that is hard for the Massachusetts Democrat to walk away from.
JetBlue and Spirit first announced the proposed acquisition in July 2022. Warren moved quickly to oppose it. In June 2023, she and eight House Democrats, including New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, sent a letter to then-Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg urging the administration to hold the line against the deal.
"We urge DOT not to be pressured by misleading comments generated through JetBlue's Astroturf campaign, and to continue its careful scrutiny of the JetBlue-Spirit deal."
The Biden DOJ Antitrust Division challenged the merger in court. In January 2024, U.S. District Judge William G. Young ruled the proposed deal violated the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914. JetBlue called off the acquisition two months later, in March 2024.
The day after JetBlue walked away, Warren celebrated on X. She wrote that she had "warned for months that a JetBlue-Spirit Airlines merger would have led to fewer flights and higher fares." She said the DOJ and DOT "were right to stand up for consumers and fight against runaway airline consolidation."
Then came the line that has aged the worst: "This is a Biden win for flyers!"
Spirit filed for bankruptcy in 2024. The airline, which primarily served lower-income customers with bare-bones fares, never recovered. By early Saturday, it was over. The carrier's workforce had numbered more than 17,000 employees.
Moreno, the Ohio Republican who previously owned more than a dozen car dealerships before unseating an incumbent Democratic senator, did not mince words on X Saturday morning:
"The 14,000 employees at Spirit who've lost their job loss, the travelers who will now pay higher fares, and the shareholders and debt holders who have been wiped out can thank Elizabeth Warren. Electing left politicians, who have ZERO business experience, has consequences."
The broader question of whether leaders with no private-sector experience should drive competition policy is one that runs through ongoing debates about Democratic Senate leadership and the party's direction on economic matters.
Duffy, who succeeded Buttigieg at DOT, used a Saturday morning press conference to trace the chain of events directly back to the Biden administration and Warren. He laid out the sequence plainly:
"There was a proposed merger between JetBlue and Spirit, and Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg, along with the Biden DOJ, decided that they did not want that merger to take place."
Duffy then turned to the consequences, the very outcomes Warren had promised the blocked merger would prevent.
"Now, many at the time said this was a disaster. This merger should have been allowed, and this today would indicate this is not better for travelers, this is not better for pricing, this is not better for competition, actually, it's worse."
He noted that Warren had cheered the blocked deal as "a Biden win for flyers." And while Duffy acknowledged the need for careful scrutiny of airline mergers, he was blunt about the verdict history has delivered.
"If the markets are saying there needs to be a merger because there's health issues with one of the airlines, or more than one airline, we have to take a look at it and make sure we make the right choices. And in this situation, history has judged the denial of the merger between JetBlue and Spirit through the Biden administration with I think a view that it was a massive mistake."
Warren responded on X Saturday with a multi-pronged defense. She blamed "spiking fuel prices from Trump's war" and the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz, calling it "the nail in the coffin for twice-bankrupted Spirit airline." She also noted that the merger "failed because a judge, appointed by Ronald Reagan, said the deal was illegal."
There is a factual kernel in that claim. Judge Young, who issued the January 2024 ruling, was indeed a Reagan appointee. And the ruling did find the merger violated century-old antitrust law. But Warren's framing omits her own role in lobbying the Biden administration to challenge the deal in the first place, and her public celebration when it collapsed.
Warren also argued that "Republicans are desperate to shift blame from higher costs hitting families." She pointed to the dominance of the Big Four airlines, American, Delta, Southwest, and United, which she said control 75% of the U.S. market. In her telling, the real threat to consumers was consolidation, not the loss of a budget carrier.
Warren's focus on housing and corporate power has been a consistent thread in her Senate career, visible in fights ranging from corporate homebuying restrictions to airline mergers. The question is whether that ideological consistency has produced good results for the working-class Americans she claims to champion.
GasBuddy analyst Patrick De Haan offered a data point that partially supports Warren's fuel-price argument, but also highlights how fragile Spirit's position was after the merger collapsed. De Haan noted on X Saturday morning that Spirit's restructuring plan had assumed jet fuel costs of about $2.24 a gallon in 2026 and $2.14 in 2027. By the end of April, prices had climbed to roughly $4.51 a gallon, more than double the airline's projections.
That gap is staggering. But it raises a follow-up question Warren has not addressed: Would Spirit have been in a restructuring plan at all if the JetBlue acquisition had gone through? The airline filed for bankruptcy only after the deal died.
Economist Peter Schiff made that point directly in a reply to Warren's post:
"So why did you block the Jet Blue, Spirit Airlines merger? The combined company would have been better competition than Jet Blue alone. now that Spirit is gone thanks to your intervention."
The logic is straightforward. A merged JetBlue-Spirit would have been a larger competitor to the Big Four. Instead, Spirit is gone entirely, and the budget-fare options it provided for lower-income travelers have disappeared with it. The market Warren claimed to be protecting is now less competitive, not more.
Warren is an attorney and former law professor. Before running for elected office, she built her reputation on consumer protection and anti-corporate advocacy. That record has earned her a loyal following on the left. But the Spirit Airlines shutdown is the kind of real-world outcome that tests whether populist rhetoric matches populist results.
The people who flew Spirit were not affluent business travelers. They were families stretching a budget, workers commuting between cities, and retirees looking for the cheapest seat available. Those are the voters Warren says she fights for. They are now facing fewer choices and, as Duffy and Moreno argued, higher fares.
Meanwhile, the Senate continues to wrestle with economic policy on multiple fronts, from housing to energy costs. In each case, the question is the same: Do the people making the decisions understand what happens downstream when they get it wrong?
The proposed half-billion-dollar government bailout that might have kept Spirit afloat also fell through, a detail that underscores just how far gone the airline was by the time the political class started looking for a fix. The time to save Spirit, critics argue, was before the merger was blocked, not after.
Regulatory reform and bipartisan efforts to reduce bureaucratic barriers have gained traction in other policy areas. Whether that same pragmatism will reach airline competition policy remains an open question.
In March 2024, Warren called the blocked merger "a Biden win for flyers." In May 2026, the airline those flyers depended on shut its doors. More than 14,000 workers, by Moreno's count, lost their jobs. Shareholders and debt holders were wiped out. And the budget carrier that served working-class Americans for over three decades no longer exists.
Warren now blames fuel prices, a Reagan-appointed judge, and Republicans. But the June 2023 letter she signed urged the government to keep fighting the deal. The celebration she posted when it collapsed is still online for anyone to read. And the consequences she dismissed are now landing on the people who could least afford them.
When politicians with no business experience lecture the market about competition and then the market shrinks, the people left holding the bag are never the politicians.