In 2024, the Biden administration killed a proposed merger between Spirit Airlines and JetBlue. If the two companies were to join forces, declared then-attorney general Merrick Garland, it would “limit choices and drive up ticket prices for passengers across the country.”
One year later, it’s clear Garland’s meddling, not the merger, was the real problem. Unable to stay afloat on its own, Spirit Airlines went bankrupt and JetBlue may not be far behind. The most powerful airlines on earth ended up with even less competition while ticket prices shot up.
Last week, even a former CEO of Delta has suggested that blocking the merger was a mistake, arguing that government antitrust enforcers effectively killed airline competition. Yet this was par for the course for the Biden administration, which rarely thought through the consequences of its heavy-handed actions.
Now, a Washington, D.C. interest group is trying to keep the failed Biden economic legacy alive. Worse, they’re trying to appeal to populist conservatives to do it.
They’re called the American Economic Liberties Project (AELP). The AELP was founded and led for years by Sarah Miller, a former senior advisor to Lina Khan, the head of Biden’s Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and arguably the most anti-business figure in the Biden administration. Khan’s legacy is one of harassing American companies for little reason other than their being companies.
You name it and the Biden administration sued it: John Deere, Ticketmaster, Visa, 7-Eleven, four of the Big Five tech companies. At one point, 40 percent of the businesses on the S&P 500 market cap were being investigated by Team Biden.
Under Khan, the government junked what was called the “consumer welfare standard” of antitrust litigation in favor of a more blanket “big is bad” mentality. If you were a successful and growing company, you had a target on your back so far as the Biden administration was concerned.
The problem was this often ended up squashing the very competition it was supposed to protect. Like with Spirit and JetBlue. Or with Kroger and Albertsons, two grocery chains that tried to merge so they could compete with food retail giants like Walmart and Amazon only to be blocked by Khan’s FTC.
Of course, AELP cheered most of these suits in. In fact, even as recently as late September, its leadership testified before Congress, blaming the airline competition crisis on deregulation rather than the antitrust shackles that AELP helped cement.
Thankfully, one of the first things Donald Trump did upon taking office was to force out Lina Khan. But her legacy lives on over at the AELP.
Take the AELP’s crusade against pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs). PBMs have become a whipping boy in the healthcare industry but their entire role is to negotiate with the big drug companies on behalf of the businesses that hire them to bring down prescription prices for their health plans. As CVS puts it, “PBMs are one of the few parts of the prescription drug supply chain specifically dedicated to lowering costs.”
It’s no wonder Big Pharma hates PBMs—and so does the AELP. They’ve referred to PBMs as a “mafia” and encouraged the Trump administration to throw the book at them through a frivolous Lina Khan lawsuit against them. Never mind that PBMs save the average patient more than $1,000 every year—money the AELP would apparently rather see in the hands of the drug companies.
Sometimes the AELP’s audacity is stunning. The group recently tried to stop the Trump administration from killing a Biden-era rule that would have voided 30 million noncompete contracts. Just like that. No input from businesses or workers or the states. Just a single signature from a government bureaucrat. Their pleas didn’t stop Trump FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson, who said, the Khan FTC’s ban is “unlawful six ways from Sunday” before killing it.
Ultimately, this is what the AELP is all about: maintaining an economic philosophy that says the Washington administrative state is king and can do whatever it wants. Congress shouldn’t trust them.
There are valid criticisms to be made of the adverse outcomes that come from Washington regulators rigging the deck to favor big businesses, eroding competition and consumer welfare win the process. Populist conservatives have been making these criticisms and their elected representatives in Washington ought to listen.
Big government claims it’s protecting us, but too often it just protects big business.
Washington regulators say they’re looking out for consumers, but in reality, they rig the rules to help corporate giants crush smaller competitors. That’s not capitalism. It’s cronyism.
Populist conservatives are right to call this out. It’s time their representatives in Congress started listening.
