Former Secretary Details How He Quadrupled Airline Fines Without Congressional Approval

What was said

"At one point the Department lawyers came to me on this case where an airline was holding out on hundreds of millions of dollars of refunds. And they said, 'We're going to get them to finally pay it back because they're legally required to, and there's going to be a fine of a couple million dollars.' I said, 'Well, I don't think that fine really had much of an effect. So what if you add a zero?' And it turns out we had the authority to just add a zero."

Pete Buttigieg revealed that as Transportation Secretary, he dramatically increased enforcement penalties against airlines by multiplying fines tenfold, using existing legal authority that previous administrations had not fully exploited. He also created a transparency website, flightrights.gov, that publicly compared airline customer service policies, which pressured carriers to voluntarily improve protections for stranded passengers. The airlines settled rather than challenge the department in court because they knew the enforcement was legally sound.