During the winter holidays of 2022, snowfall blanketed much of the western U.S., covering Buffalo in 56 inches of snow and shutting down a 200-mile stretch of Interstate 90. Southwest Airlines was hit particularly hard, canceling nearly 17,000 flights, affecting around 2 million potential travelers. Stranded far from home, people missed everything from work to weddings, faced costly hotel stays, or ended up sleeping on airport terminal floors using duffel bags as pillows. The previous summer, referred to as the “summer from hell,” saw a surge in flights as people returned to travel after being largely homebound since spring 2020 due to COVID. Despite billion in federal aid, airlines struggled to get people to their destinations, with passengers often receiving partial refunds or vouchers with expiration dates as compensation. Many began questioning who was to blame, and a large number pointed fingers at Pete Buttigieg, who had been serving as Transportation Secretary for nearly two years.
When the Southwest debacle hit in December, Buttigieg was already facing scrutiny—but this incident intensified it. A director at the populist economic group Open Markets posted that the Transportation Secretary has consumer protection and antitrust powers to prevent airline misconduct, but that Buttigieg showed little interest in using them. Shortly after, writer and activist Cory Doctorow published an essay criticizing Buttigieg’s perceived “learned helplessness.” An editor at The Verge remarked that Buttigieg’s approach to handling airlines “nearly sinks his chances for a future presidential bid,” adding, “his opponents will wreck him on this issue alone.” A New York Times headline in January 2023 read, “Air Travel Issues Land a Star of Biden’s Cabinet in Trouble.” Buttigieg appeared on networks from Fox to PBS and MSNBC, condemning the state of the airline industry as “unacceptable,” yet some critics remained skeptical, feeling that the billion airline industry might be beyond the government’s reach.
Buttigieg, 42, told me that the Southwest episode was an “education,” which made him more adamant about the matter. This led him to make several decisions spurred by advocates of antitrust thought, an old friend, and those pushing for change in the airline industry that have led some of his harshest critics to reassess him. Now, many no longer see him as too cautious, centrist, poll-tested, or corporate-friendly. Instead, former critics say that Buttigieg has emerged as a genuine ally in efforts to rein in industries that had grown too large and powerful.
Bill McGee, a former flight operations specialist now advocating for airline issues with an antitrust group, spent that disastrous year criticizing Buttigieg via social media, press releases, and news coverage. “Buttigieg was just letting them get away with it day by day, week after week, month after month, making passengers suffer,” he told me about U.S. airlines. Yet, he acknowledged that something has changed. “I didn’t say anything about Pete Buttigieg. Pete Buttigieg said something about me.”
Buttigieg took office as Transportation Secretary at just 38, inheriting a vast bureaucracy—the department’s annual budget is 4 billion, with nearly 57,000 employees—but with limited political experience. Buttigieg’s high national profile—and presidential ambitions—had put him under the spotlight from the start. His on-the-job training has been public and often difficult; Republican lawmakers criticized his slow public response to the toxic train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, in the winter of 2023. However, by March 2024, he arrived at the scene of the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse in Baltimore on the same day.
But perhaps nothing will mark Buttigieg’s tenure more than the crisis in American air travel and how he responded to it. High-profile economic populists in the Biden administration, such as Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan, Jonathan Kanter of the DOJ’s Antitrust Division, and CFPB Director Rohit Chopra, may attract more attention for their attempts to reshape American industry. Buttigieg could be trying something new, yet. Instead of merely punishing wrongdoers, Buttigieg has sought to use his agency’s executive powers to restructure the industry he oversees.
Whether these changes last beyond his term—or even beyond the administration of the president who charged his cabinet with fighting concentrated corporate power—remains a fair question. Diana Moss, director of competition policy at the left-leaning think tank Progressive Policy Institute, says his regulatory changes “could be very successful or could get tangled up in bureaucracy.” One major rule is currently blocked in court, while others won’t fully take effect until a future president is in office. For them to work in the end, those who work for the agency must have the tools and motivation to follow them. Airlines are still merging, and the economics of commercial aviation are only one part of their broader portfolios.
Buttigieg has emerged as a surprising ally and asset to the part of the political left that embraces anti-monopoly and antitrust frameworks—a wing of the Democratic Party fighting to maintain its influence in a post-Biden Washington, and one that had once viewed Buttigieg as an adversary.
In late July, I met with Buttigieg for an interview on the ninth floor of the Transportation Department’s sprawling building on Washington’s waterfront. Dressed in a crisp white shirt and cobalt blue tie, he sat a few steps away from a doormat made from a piece of Portland Airport’s iconic teal carpet. This was the first of two interviews we conducted (the second took place over the phone in early September) as I tried to understand his transformation regarding the airlines and how he perceives it himself.I also talked to over a dozen people who work to protect consumers, fight unfair business practices, work for the Department of Transportation (DOT), are connected in Congress, work for the White House, and support Buttigieg.
While some see a deeper shift in his thinking, Buttigieg himself describes his approach as more of a continuation of his pragmatic “Mayor Pete” problem-solving style. “Often, I find that if you take a very practical approach,” he said in his office that day, “it can lead you to a bold goal.”