Project 2025 Tracker / What’s done, what’s next

19. Department of Transportation · Minor

Publicly support joint ventures by smaller air carriers

Not started

630 19. Department of Transportation

“Publicly indicate that a new Administration would support joint-venture efforts by smaller carriers (for example, Jet Blue and Spirit) to achieve scale necessary to reduce costs and compete more effectively with the larger carriers.”

What has happened

  1. Not started

    No statement of support for joint ventures among smaller U.S. carriers was found from this administration, and the record on airline joint ventures runs the other way. The Federal Register notice of 2025-07-28 was the Supplemental Order to **Show Cause**, tentatively withdrawing approval and antitrust immunity for the Delta–Aeromexico joint venture; the **final** action came on 2025-09-16, when DOT "terminated approval of Delta and Aeromexico's joint venture agreement and withdrew antitrust immunity", with the venture to "wind down by January 1st, 2026". The same release states the Department's general posture in terms: "Antitrust immunity for joint venture agreements is an extraordinary authority – not a right – that USDOT only supports when foreign countries abide by the basic principles of fairness, free markets, and competition." That is a large-carrier venture rather than the smaller-carrier scale the Quote has in mind, so neither release answers the ask in either direction — but together they are the Department's only recorded position on airline joint ventures, and it is a hostile one. Corrected 2026-09-03: an earlier version of this note gave the wind-down date as 2025-10-25 and treated the show-cause order as the Department's action; both are wrong.

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

  • The ask is for a public statement, so the instrument is a speech, press release or order preamble rather than a rule.
  • Corrected 2026-09-03. This note previously said transportation.gov/briefing-room is “a hard 403 to curl with a browser User-Agent and to WebFetch”. Two things are wrong with that. The path /briefing-room is now an HTTP 404 — the listing moved to transportation.gov/newsroom/press-releases — and individual /briefing-room/<slug> release pages open fine on the full-headers rung of scripts/fetch-page.mjs. The listing carries a working full-text search, ?keys=…, which was control-tested on 2026-09-03: “safety” returns ten releases, “joint venture” four, and the nonsense term zzqxwrflub none. The four “joint venture” hits are the Penn Station announcement, a Port of Longview loan, and the two adverse aviation items — the 2025-09-16 Delta–Aeromexico termination now cited above and the “Slate of America First Actions to Combat Mexico’s Abuse of Bilateral Aviation Agreement”. No statement of support for smaller-carrier joint ventures exists in the window. The read-queue row is answered.
  • The two examples the Quote names are both gone: the JetBlue–Spirit merger was enjoined in January 2024 and abandoned, and Spirit filed for bankruptcy protection in November 2024, both before the window. An ask whose named example no longer exists still has to be measured on its own words, which are about a class of transaction, not those two airlines.
  • api.regulations.gov answers on DEMO_KEY but rate-limits hard after a handful of calls (OVER_RATE_LIMIT, HTTP 429), which cut short the search for a DOT order approving a smaller-carrier alliance. Worth a second pass with a real key.
Action
issue
Object
Joint ventures among smaller U.S. air carriers
ID
1726