You Are On Your Own: How the Airline Lobby Killed the Rules That Protected You

The Compact That Was Broken

There is an unspoken contract between a passenger and an airline. You buy the ticket. You show up. The airline, in exchange for your money and your time and your trust, gets you there. When that contract breaks — when the plane sits on the tarmac until midnight, when a mechanical failure stranded you in Charlotte with no voucher, no hotel, and a customer service agent who shrugs — the question of who bears the cost has always been a political one.

For nearly a decade, that question had been slowly, grudgingly resolved in favor of the traveler. Under the Biden administration, the Department of Transportation accumulated an unprecedented record of consumer enforcement: more than $3 billion returned to passengers in refunds and reimbursements , a landmark $140 million settlement against Southwest Airlines for its catastrophic 2022 holiday meltdown that stranded two million passengers , a binding automatic-refund rule that became federal law through the 2024 FAA Reauthorization Act , and a sweeping proposed regulation that would have required airlines to compensate delayed passengers between $200 and $775 in cash — a standard long since established in Europe and Canada.

None of that is safe anymore.

In less than one calendar year, the Trump administration’s Department of Transportation has executed the most systematic rollback of airline passenger protections in the modern regulatory era. Each individual action — a withdrawal here, an enforcement pause there, a guidance memo released quietly on a Friday evening — can be rationalized in isolation. Taken together, they form a coherent pattern: the transfer of accountability from the airlines that cause disruptions to the passengers who suffer them. And at the center of the story stands a trade group that spent years crafting this agenda, a secretary of transportation who once lobbied for the very airlines he now regulates, and an industry that invested heavily in the right relationships at the right moment.

The compact has been broken. What follows is how it happened.

The Architecture of a Biden-Era Passenger Bill of Rights

To understand what has been lost, you have to understand what had been built — and how hard it was to build it.

When Pete Buttigieg took over as Transportation Secretary in 2021, the department’s consumer protection apparatus was largely reactive: it waited for passengers to complain, then decided whether to act. Buttigieg made enforcement of airline passenger rights a public and political priority in a way that no predecessor had. His DOT launched the Air Travel Consumer Report, a monthly accountability dashboard tracking which airlines canceled and delayed the most flights . It created flightrights.gov to centralize passenger information. It imposed the largest fine in DOT history against an airline for failing to issue timely refunds. When Southwest Airlines’ catastrophic software failure over Christmas 2022 left 2 million passengers stranded and nearly 17,000 flights canceled, the DOT led a public investigation and ultimately extracted a $140 million settlement – thirty times larger than any prior Transportation Department penalty for consumer protection violations.

When the Supreme Court and Congress moved in parallel, the results were codified into law. The 2024 FAA Reauthorization Act, passed with bipartisan support and signed by Biden in May of that year, embedded key consumer protections directly into statute. Airlines could no longer charge children under 14 to sit next to their parents. They were required to issue automatic refunds when they canceled flights or significantly changed schedules. Civil penalties for violations were increased.

Then, in December 2024, the Biden DOT filed an Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking — the formal opening move toward mandating cash compensation for passengers whose flights were significantly delayed or canceled by airline-caused failures like mechanical problems, staffing shortages, or technology outages. The proposed rule would have required payments between $200 and $300 for domestic delays of three or more hours, and up to $775 for delays exceeding nine hours, plus coverage for meals, hotels, and rebooking costs . It would have aligned the United States — at last — with the consumer standards of the European Union, Canada, Brazil, and the United Kingdom, all of which already mandate such compensation.

That proposal was still pending when the election was decided. It would not survive the transition.

Sean Duffy and the Revolving Door

Before Sean Duffy became the 19th Secretary of Transportation in January 2025, he was a lobbyist. From 2019 onward, he worked at BGR Government Affairs, one of Washington’s most powerful influence firms. In 2020, Duffy and BGR were retained by the Partnership for Open Skies — a coalition whose membership includes American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, and United Airlines — for $70,000 to lobby on aviation policy . He remained on BGR’s advisory board and as a consultant for its clients as recently as 2024.

Airlines for America, the industry’s primary trade association, responded to Duffy’s nomination with barely concealed jubilation. The group said it was “thrilled” with President-elect Trump’s pick and “eager to collaborate” with Duffy on “key issues impacting the U.S. airline industry” . At the time of Duffy’s nomination, the Big Three carriers — American, Delta, and United — all of which had employed Duffy as a lobbyist, were actively suing the DOT in the Fifth Circuit to overturn the Biden-era junk fee transparency rule.

At his confirmation hearing before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, Duffy was not pressed on these obvious conflicts. As The Hill later noted, senators “predominantly allowed him to sidestep tough questioning”. He was not asked whether he would recuse himself from matters involving his former clients. He was not asked about his 2022 Fox Business appearance in which he had attacked Buttigieg’s investigation of Southwest Airlines, declaring “Southwest will fix this… Pete Buttigieg never will” and that markets would sort out what regulators shouldn’t touch.

The markets, of course, had not sorted it out. The Southwest meltdown — the very disaster Duffy had waved away — was the largest airline consumer protection violation in DOT history, and it was resolved only through the forceful regulatory intervention Duffy had mocked.

Once confirmed, Duffy moved quickly. In September 2025, the DOT formally announced the withdrawal of the Biden-era delay compensation proposal, offering only that it was “consistent with Department and Administration priorities” as justification. The department told NOTUS it was worried the additional costs could drive up ticket prices and incentivize airlines to get planes out too quickly rather than safely — concerns, notably, that had been raised by the industry itself.

In December 2025, Representatives Jerrold Nadler and Senators Elizabeth Warren and Richard Blumenthal wrote to the DOT Inspector General requesting an ethics investigation into whether Duffy’s conflicts of interest had “contributed to his department ending passenger protection rules” and whether “he has favored the airline industry that he previously lobbied for”. The letter noted that Duffy had recently attended a sporting event in the private suite of BGR’s managing director — the lobbying firm where Duffy had worked — even after taking office.

The 93-Page Wish List

Airlines for America did not simply wait to benefit from the change in administrations. In September 2025, the trade association — representing American, Delta, United, Southwest, Alaska, and other major carriers — filed a formal 93-page petition with the DOT seeking the rollback of virtually every significant consumer protection established over the prior decade.

The document was sweeping. It asked the department to:

Eliminate mandatory cash refunds for canceled or significantly delayed flights, replacing them with voluntary airline vouchers that often carry blackout dates and tight expiration windows . Eliminate the “all-in” pricing rule requiring airlines to display total ticket costs — including baggage fees, seat assignments, and surcharges — in initial fare searches, allowing carriers to revert to advertising artificially low base fares while hiding the true cost until late in the booking process. Eliminate the family seating policy that requires airlines to guarantee children age 13 and under an adjacent seat to an accompanying adult at no additional charge. Eliminate DOT guidelines on wheelchair assistance and accessibility for disabled passengers. Eliminate the Air Travel Consumer Report — the monthly DOT publication that publicly tracks flight delays, cancellations, and complaints by carrier, giving passengers data they need to make informed choices. And remove DOT cooperation with state attorneys general on passenger rights enforcement, while imposing a two-year statute of limitations on DOT enforcement actions.

The petition framed these demands as consistent with President Trump’s deregulatory mandate, arguing that protections established under the Biden and Obama administrations were “characteristic of big government with its overreaching regulatory agenda”. The airlines claimed that competition — the same market forces that had produced unprecedented rates of delays, the Southwest catastrophe, and more than 150,000 consumer complaints to the DOT in 2025 alone — would protect passengers more effectively than regulation.

Consumer rights attorney Christopher Migliaccio put it plainly: “Removing these rules would mean consumers will face many more surprise charges and less protection against refundable purchases”. Paul Hudson, president of FlyersRights — the nation’s largest airline passenger nonprofit, established in 2007 — wrote to Duffy three times requesting a meeting . Hudson’s frustration was pointed: “I understand you have heard the A4A arguments against regulations. But have you heard the views of airline passengers?”

The lobbying was backed by serious money. According to OpenSecrets, Airlines for America spent $5,682,700 on federal lobbying in 2024 alone. The total for the entire airline industry in 2024 reached $29 million, with Delta spending $5.58 million, American Airlines $4.7 million, and United $3.59 million. In the first six months of 2025, Airlines for America, Delta, United, Southwest, and American together accounted for more than $12.2 million of $16.4 million spent on airline-industry lobbying — a pace that put the industry on track to shatter its own record.

Those dollars flowed, strategically, to firms with Trump connections. Delta hired BGR Group — Duffy’s former employer — in February 2025 to lobby on “issues related to the airline industry,” retaining a team that included a former Trump White House special assistant. United hired Ballard Partners, a firm with deep Trump ties, and Michael Best Strategies within days of the election. Airlines for America retained Ballard Partners in January 2025 to lobby on “aviation policy for domestic carriers”. According to a Politico analysis, BGR Group’s lobbying revenues rose 58 percent in 2025, reaching $71.5 million — a firm now simultaneously employing Duffy’s former colleagues while its alumni ran the DOT.

The Rollbacks, One by One

What followed was systematic.

The Delay Compensation Rule. On September 4, 2025, the Trump DOT formally withdrew the Biden-era advance notice of proposed rulemaking that would have required airlines to compensate passengers between $200 and $775 for controllable delays and cancellations. No alternative was proposed. Airlines for America praised the decision as consistent with the president’s deregulatory agenda. Consumer advocates noted that the United States now stands uniquely isolated: every other major aviation market — the EU, Canada, Brazil, the UK — mandates such compensation. Under EU Regulation 261/2004, European passengers receive between €250 and €600 for delays exceeding three hours . Under Canadian Air Passenger Protection Regulations, travelers receive comparable cash payments. American passengers get nothing.

The Formal Federal Register Withdrawal. On November 17, 2025, the DOT published its formal withdrawal in the Federal Register, making official what had been announced in September. The compensation that would have been between $200 and $300 for short domestic delays and up to $775 for longer disruptions — plus hotels, meals, and rebooking — was gone. In its Federal Register notice, the DOT said the policy would create “unnecessary regulatory burdens”.

The Flight Number Loophole. On December 5, 2025, the DOT announced it would not enforce refund requirements when airlines simply renumber a canceled flight and rebook passengers on it — a maneuver that technically makes a canceled flight look like a continuation. The enforcement pause ran through June 30, 2026. Passengers booked on a flight that was effectively canceled and replaced would lose the right to demand a refund, as long as the rebooking involved no “significant change or delay” — a standard the airline, not the passenger, would define.

The Aircraft Recall Exclusion. In December 2025, the DOT issued guidance clarifying that disruptions caused by aircraft recalls — groundings ordered because of safety concerns with a specific aircraft model — do not constitute events “within an airline’s control”. The practical effect: when a manufacturer’s recall strands thousands of passengers, airlines owe them nothing beyond their original ticket refund, if that . The guidance emerged just as an Airbus recall had disrupted travel plans across the country, leaving passengers to absorb out-of-pocket costs for hotels and meals.

The Junk Fees Transparency Rule. The Biden DOT’s 2024 rule requiring airlines to disclose all ancillary fees upfront — baggage, seat selection, change fees — when passengers shopped on booking websites was challenged in court by American, Delta, United, and other carriers. In January 2025, the Fifth Circuit halted enforcement pending review . By early 2026, the court vacated the rule entirely after finding that the DOT had relied on a study not available during the public comment period . The Trump DOT accepted the court’s finding rather than defending the rule. The result: airlines can continue advertising the lowest-possible base fare — the figure that bears no relationship to what travelers will actually pay.

The Wheelchair Accessibility Rules. In December 2024, the Biden DOT finalized new accessibility protections for disabled passengers who use wheelchairs, including mandatory training for airline personnel, liability for mishandling wheelchairs and scooters, and financial compensation when airlines failed to accommodate passengers’ assistive devices. The Trump DOT delayed enforcement twice, then announced it would not enforce four key provisions — including the presumption of airline liability when wheelchairs are damaged or not returned in the condition they were received — until at least December 31, 2026. A new rulemaking process was launched, with a final determination not expected before late 2026 or early 2027.

The Southwest Forgiveness. In May 2025, the Trump DOT dropped a $2.1 million lawsuit filed by the Biden administration accusing Southwest Airlines of operating chronically delayed flights in violation of consumer protection law. No explanation was given. In December 2025, the DOT went further: it waived the final $11 million of a three-part government payment owed under the landmark $140 million 2022 holiday meltdown settlement, citing the airline’s investment in technology upgrades and “improved on-time performance”. Southwest had already made two $12 million payments, but the final installment, due January 31, 2026, was forgiven.

The Companies Behind the Curtain

Airlines for America is the umbrella, but the individual carriers deserve examination on their own terms.

American Airlines lobbied against every major consumer protection rule, spent $4.7 million on federal lobbying in 2024, and joined the Fifth Circuit lawsuit against the junk fees disclosure rule alongside United and Delta. The airline was one of the Partnership for Open Skies members that employed Sean Duffy as a lobbyist.

Delta Air Lines spent $5.58 million lobbying in 2024 , hired Duffy’s former firm BGR Group the month after his confirmation , and was among the carriers that publicly praised the delay compensation withdrawal. When the Biden DOT had investigated Delta in 2024 over its slow recovery from the CrowdStrike software outage, the airline ultimately paid a $200 million settlement — the largest airline penalty in history at the time. Under the Trump administration, similar accountability has not been forthcoming.

United Airlines spent $3.59 million on federal lobbying in 2024 and hired both Ballard Partners and Michael Best Strategies in the run-up to and immediately following the 2024 election . United declined to comment to NOTUS about its lobbying activities.

Southwest Airlines emerged as perhaps the most tangible beneficiary of regulatory favoritism. Beyond the dropped $2.1 million lawsuit and the waived $11 million fine, Southwest had been the explicit subject of Duffy’s 2022 Fox News defense — the airline he predicted would “fix this” without government intervention, even as 2 million passengers had just been stranded . Duffy’s prediction proved wrong. The regulatory intervention proved necessary. And the regulatory agency Duffy now runs gave Southwest a pass anyway.

The Passengers Who Paid the Price

While the regulatory machinery was being dismantled, travelers kept flying — and kept experiencing disruptions. In 2025, the DOT received more than 150,000 consumer complaints about airline service The department’s new enforcement posture means that, for most complaints not involving civil rights, travelers receive no individual response; complaints are reviewed as part of “targeted or sample assessments”. Minor infractions — Wi-Fi outages, baggage delivery delays — now trigger warnings rather than penalties before fines can be assessed.

The contrast with European passengers grows more stark by the year. A USA Today analysis found that U.S. flights were nearly three times more likely to experience long delays than European flights in 2024, with same-day cancellations also more prevalent. The CEO of AirHelp, a European passenger rights firm, argued that robust EU compensation requirements had contributed to a 5 percent decrease in European flight delays — and that the cost of these protections amounted to between sixty cents and $1.20 per passenger. For one dollar per ticket, European passengers enjoy protections that American passengers may never see.

The family seating issue has a particular cruelty to it. Congress passed a provision in the 2024 FAA Reauthorization Act mandating that airlines not charge children under 14 to sit with a parent . The Trump DOT has not finalized the implementing regulation . Senator Ed Markey, one of the provision’s chief architects, noted the bitter irony in May 2026: the ban on family seating fees was championed bipartisanly — including by Vice President JD Vance — and yet the DOT refused to implement it. “That the Trump DOT won’t move ahead with a ban on family seating fees — a bipartisan proposal championed by the current Republican Vice President — demonstrates its true favored constituency: the airline industry,” Markey’s office said.

The Congressional Resistance

The legislative response has been vocal, largely Democratic, and so far futile.

In December 2025, a group of 15 Democratic senators led by Mark Kelly, Ed Markey, and Richard Blumenthal introduced the Flight Delay and Cancellation Compensation Act. The bill would direct the DOT to establish an Aviation Rulemaking Committee including consumer groups, and then mandate at least $300 in cash compensation for delays of three to six hours and at least $600 for delays of six hours or more, with additional requirements for meals, lodging, and rebooking. The bill would also include a backstop — an interim final rule that takes effect eighteen months after enactment — designed to prevent a future DOT from burying the protections in regulatory delay.

The bill was endorsed by the National Consumers League and FlyersRights. It has been referred to the Senate Commerce Committee, where similar proposals have stalled repeatedly in prior years. With Republicans in the majority, it faces long odds.

Warren and Nadler wrote to the DOT Inspector General in December 2025, requesting a formal ethics investigation into whether Duffy’s conflicts of interest had shaped his regulatory decisions. Warren described the situation starkly in a USA Today interview: “Instead of lowering the cost of air travel, former airline lobbyist Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy ended a rule that would’ve forced airlines to compensate Americans for expenses when flights are canceled”.

What Remains — and What Doesn’t

To be precise about what has been lost, it is necessary to be precise about what remains.

Passengers are still entitled to full cash refunds when an airline cancels a flight, as required by the 2024 FAA Reauthorization Act — though the refund is no longer automatic and must be requested. The refund right for significant schedule changes also remains, though the definition of “significant” is under active DOT reconsideration . Tarmac delay rules — three hours for domestic flights, four for international, before passengers must be allowed to deplane — remain in force. Baggage liability caps and denied-boarding compensation rules are still on the books.

What is gone, or effectively suspended: any cash compensation for carrier-caused delays. Any requirement that airlines cover meals and hotels during disruptions. Any transparency requirement for ancillary fees in initial fare searches. Any presumption of airline liability when wheelchairs are damaged or not returned. And the enforcement regime that gave all of these rules teeth.

The DOT under Duffy has executed 285 deregulatory actions — more than the Interior Department, Labor Department, and Environmental Protection Agency combined, according to an analysis by the American Action Forum . Dan Goldbeck, the forum’s director of regulatory policy, told NOTUS he anticipated the pace of deregulation to accelerate further in 2026.

The Long Arc, Bending Back

There is a pattern that runs beneath the surface of this story — not just political, but structural. Since deregulation in 1978, the U.S. airline industry has consolidated relentlessly: 46 domestic mergers, 214 airline failures. The Big Four — American, Delta, Southwest, and United — now control more than 80 percent of the domestic market. Only two new carriers have entered the market in the past seventeen years . In a genuinely competitive market, passengers dissatisfied with service would switch carriers. In an oligopoly where route options are limited, airports have few competing carriers, and prices move in lockstep, the market discipline that Airlines for America invokes as a substitute for regulation is largely theoretical.

The argument that regulation raises ticket prices deserves scrutiny. Airlines for America points to a Bureau of Labor Statistics figure showing that airline fares fell 1.5 percent between 2019 and 2024. What the industry does not say is that the cost of ancillary fees — the unbundled charges for bags, seat selection, boarding priority — has exploded in the same period, allowing carriers to advertise low base fares while extracting more money per passenger overall. The total cost of flying, stripped of its misleading headline fare, has not fallen.

Paul Hudson of FlyersRights was direct in his assessment. “The first round has gone to the airline lobby,” he told NOTUS in September 2025. “But we’ll see how that plays out in the future”.

That future is uncertain. The DOT has signaled that it anticipates further rollbacks. Congress has signaled that it intends to resist. The courts have proven unpredictable. And the traveling public — 150,000 complaints in a single year, year after year — continues to absorb the costs that a functioning regulatory system might have redirected back to those who caused them.

The compact between the passenger and the airline was always a legal fiction, held together by enforcement. When the enforcement ends, the fiction is all that remains: the polite fiction that the airline, left to its own commercial judgment and competitive instincts, will make you whole when it leaves you stranded — not because the law requires it, but because it cares.

History suggests otherwise. The passengers already know it. The question is whether anyone in authority still does.

Sources

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2. The US Government Is Letting Southwest Airlines Off Easy — Jacobin
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