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

19. Department of Transportation · Notable

Restore the Trump rule on “unfair and deceptive practices” airline rulemaking

Done

630 19. Department of Transportation

“The Trump Administration reformed the process for issuing such “unfair and deceptive practices” rules, but the Biden Administration promptly reversed those reforms. A new Administration should restore them.”

What has happened

  1. Done

    DOT issued the final rule, effective 2026-07-31. It restores the 2020 procedures the 2022 rule had displaced: the three-part test for granting a hearing, the "plausible prima facie case" standard in place of "clear and convincing", a neutral hearing officer, and formal findings of fact; it also adds an appeal to the Secretary where the General Counsel denies a petition, and rescinds the 2023 Clarification of Formal Enforcement Procedures. The 2022 interpretive Guidance on the meaning of "unfair" and "deceptive" survives; DOT said in both the NPRM and the final rule that it intends to revoke it separately, and had not done so by 2026-09-01.

  2. Attempted

    DOT proposed to reinstate the hearing procedures the 2020 rule had established for discretionary rulemakings declaring an aviation practice unfair or deceptive, and sought comment on rescinding the 2023 Clarification of Formal Enforcement Procedures. The proposal followed DOT's April 2025 deregulatory request for information, in which Airlines for America, IATA, United Airlines and the Reason Foundation had asked for exactly this.

Research log

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

Research notes

  • Boundary call, flagged in .scratch/research-phase/spot-checks.md. The Quote asks that the Trump-era reforms to “the process for issuing such rules” be restored, and the process reforms — the hearing procedures of the 2020 UDP Rule — are back and in force, so done. A reader who took “those reforms” to include the whole 2020 UDP package would say partial, because the 2022 Guidance interpreting “unfair” and “deceptive” is still in place pending a separate revocation.
  • The final rule’s own history of the instruments is unusually complete and was read in full at govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2026-07-01/html/2026-13295.htm: the 2020 UDP Rule (85 FR 78707, RIN 2105-AE72), the 2022 UDP Rule (87 FR 5655, RIN 2105-AF03), the 2022 Guidance (87 FR 52677) and the 2023 Clarification (88 FR 39352, RIN 2105-AF18).
  • The same Department-wide procedural restoration is #1709 (49 CFR part 5, done 2026-04-27); this item is the aviation-consumer-protection half of the same program and DOT’s 2026 rule cites the part 5 rulemaking in its preamble. The ticket 26 review should check that the two are not double-counting one instrument — they are not: different CFR parts, different dockets.
  • DOT’s other in-window aviation-consumer actions — the 2025-11-17 withdrawal of the Airline Passenger Rights proposal, the 2025-12-05 and 2026-07-07 Airline Refunds rules, the 2026-07-01 and 2026-07-31 air-fare advertising proposals, the 2026-07-02 ancillary-fee rule and the 2026-01-06 notice on Office of Aviation Consumer Protection enforcement policy — are substantive rather than procedural and belong to other asks in this chapter.
Action
restore
Object
DOT rule defining “unfair or deceptive practices” in aviation
ID
1725