If you wondered whether there was anything to Pete Buttigieg besides an engaging media presence, the answer is no.
Case in point, the Secretary of Transportation ignored warnings from state attorneys general about problems in the airline industry.
This is typical for "Mayor Pete".
Southwest Airlines stranding thousands of Americans during the holiday season is not some unexpected crisis nor the normal consequence of inclement weather — and federal officials are not powerless bystanders. Before the debacle, attorneys general from both parties were sounding alarms about regulators’ lax oversight of the airline industry, imploring them and congressional lawmakers to crack down.
The warnings came just before Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg appeared on national television insisting travel would improve by the holidays, and before Southwest executives — flush with cash from a government bailout — announced new dividend payouts to shareholders, while paying themselves millions of dollars.
Four months before Southwest’s mass cancellation of flights, 38 state attorneys general wrote to congressional leaders declaring that Buttigieg’s agency “failed to respond and to provide appropriate recourse” to thousands of consumer complaints about airlines customer service.
“Americans are justifiably frustrated that federal government agencies charged with overseeing airline consumer protection are unable or unwilling to hold the airline industry accountable,” they wrote in August, arguing that Congress must pass legislation empowering state officials to enforce consumer protection laws against the airlines.
Weeks before that, New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) sent Buttigieg a letter warning of "the deeply troubling and escalating pattern of airlines delaying and canceling flights" particularly during holidays. She outlined various actions he could take to deter the practice.
The demands for tougher enforcement were echoed in a concurrent letter to Buttigieg by Democratic U.S. Senators Elizabeth Warren and Alex Padilla.
………
While forsaking those technology investments, Southwest paid a handful of executives more than $112 million over the last five years, according to executive compensation data compiled by Salary.com.
One week before the Southwest scheduling disaster, 34 attorneys general led by Colorado Democrat Phil Weiser sent another letter begging Buttigieg to “impose significant fines for cancellations and extended delays that are not weather-related or otherwise unavoidable.”
………
“The Department of Transportation has announced a rule on refunds that won’t take effect for at least 2-3 years, sent the airline CEOs a letter, and promised to unveil an information dashboard,” wrote AELP in September 2022. “It has yet to fine any U.S. airline a single dollar for unpaid refunds, flight cancellations, or systematic violations of consumer protection law, and has issued fewer enforcement orders in 2021 than in any single year of the Trump and Obama administrations.”
Under pressure, transportation regulators subsequently fined Frontier Airlines, but AELP noted that Buttigieg's agency declined to do the same against much larger more politically powerful airlines, despite there being far more complaints against them.
I get why Buttigieg is Secretary of Transportation, it was a part of a deal that Joe Biden cut with him to pull out of the race just before the Super-Tuesday round of primaries, and Biden thought that Secretary of Transportation would be a place where he could not do too much damage.
It appears that the Biden administration lost that bet.
0 comments :
Post a Comment