Rick Bowmer/AP Photo
People pass through Salt Lake City International Airport, January 11, 2023.
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has faced criticism for a series of recent breakdowns in the nation’s air travel system, from the flurry of cancellations at Southwest Airlines over the Christmas holiday due to a meltdown of its scheduling system, which stranded over a million passengers, to an unusual full ground stop last week after a computer failure in the Federal Aviation Administration’s Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) system.
But some high-profile help for the department is on the way, which could signal a potential change of direction at a historically captured agency.
Jen Howard, the former chief of staff to Lina Khan at the Federal Trade Commission, has been hired at the Department of Transportation as the agency’s top official for competition policy, the Prospect has learned. Howard, who also was chief of staff to then-FTC Commissioner Rohit Chopra, has been a key behind-the-scenes player in that agency’s more aggressive antitrust and consumer protection posture. During her time at the FTC since mid-2018, the agency has cracked down on counterfeit “Made in the USA” labels, proposed stiffer surveillance and privacy rules, sued a number of large firms for antitrust violations and illegal mergers, and most recently issued a proposed rule to ban noncompete agreements that restrict freedoms for over 30 million workers.
A Department of Transportation spokesperson confirmed to the Prospect that Howard began work on Tuesday as DOT’s chief competition officer. She will also be engaged with the administration’s ongoing work on competition policy, best articulated in the July 2021 executive order on competition.
The hire is actually in the spirit of that order—an attempt to build out a pro-competition mindset across the government, even in federal agencies that have traditionally paid little attention to that topic.
Howard’s role at DOT is primarily concerned with competition policy, but if successful, her work would spill over into ameliorating one of the worst periods for passengers in U.S. air travel history. At the outset of the pandemic, the airlines received $54 billion in bailout funds specifically to preserve their workforce and prevent mass layoffs. However, the leading carriers pushed their staffs to take buyouts, leaving them unprepared for increased demand in the subsequent years. As a result, nearly 130,000 flights were canceled in just the first six months of last year, in large part because the airlines lacked the manpower to fly them.
As the Prospect reported last week, the FTC and DOT share the same language on unfair and deceptive practices, meaning that DOT can make rules to ban such practices and issue heavy fines on airlines that don’t comply. This can be used to bolster competition as well. For example, the FAA has oversight responsibility on slot administration, which helps to set air traffic for capacity-constrained airports in larger metro areas like New York, Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. In some instances, larger carriers hoard grandfathered slots and deny them to smaller competitors. In theory, a rulemaking could condition control of slots on maximizing seat capacity or hitting consumer protection benchmarks.
DOT has sweeping powers to ensure competition in the airline industry and protect consumers from abusive business practices.
Other competition issues include the pending merger between low-cost carriers JetBlue and Spirit Airlines, as well as a partnership between JetBlue and American that would resemble a merger. The Department of Justice has sued to block the latter, and a ruling is expected soon. But DOT has not taken an official public position on either, though statutorily it is supposed to weigh in with the Justice Department on competition-related matters in its various areas of jurisdiction.
DOT has sweeping powers to ensure competition in the airline industry and protect consumers from abusive business practices. For decades, however, political will to use them has been lacking; there has been an unwillingness to punish airlines amid heavy lobbying from the industry. Howard is someone who has demonstrated that political will at other agencies.
Consumer advocates were pleased about the news about Howard. “If she is going to come in and bring some of the energy we saw at FTC, we are certainly hopeful that things can improve there,” said William McGee of the American Economic Liberties Project, a high-profile critic of DOT’s muted response to the recent cascade of airline misfortune. “It’s clear to us that DOT is not adhering to the pro-competition agenda the way other departments have.”
Now, of course it will take more than one person to reinvigorate DOT regulatory activity. The current issues predate Secretary Buttigieg and have reflected a lax approach under both parties, with officials from industry rotating in and out of top regulatory positions. Career officials throughout the ranks who serve secretaries from both parties have been reluctant to use the prodigious authority at the fingertips of the agency.
But hiring Howard is a good start. “It’s a great thing that we’re getting a fresh set of eyes coming from an agency where competition and consumers are keywords,” McGee said. “If she’s able to help move the needle at DOT, we’ll see.”
