In a blow to airline consumer rights, the Department of Transportation is proposing new policies that would significantly weaken the ability of the agency to enforce federal consumer protections.
In a notice published in the federal register on January 6, the DOT’s Office of Aviation Consumer Protection (OACP), which is like the department’s consumer watchdog unit, is softening its stance on enforcing penalties such as fines for airlines that violate consumer air travel regulations.
Instead, the office’s “enforcement focus will be on ensuring compliance with civil rights and consumer protection regulations rather than finding and penalizing entities for violations,” according to the proposed policy.
If officials do find that an airline has violated consumer protections, it will instead “attempt to address the problem by issuing a warning letter to help the regulated entity achieve compliance and resolve the issues before pursuing enforcement actions,” the DOT’s new policy says.
But airlines aren’t completely off the hook when it comes to potential fines. When the office “has evidence of widespread, systemic, egregious, or intentional violations, it may determine that enforcement action is appropriate,” according to the adjusted policy. However, those enforcement actions could be significantly less severe than in recent years and might include “a reasonable civil penalty” and “requiring reasonable corrective actions such as ensuring consumers are made whole.”
Officials cited an executive order from Trump in February 2025 as the basis for the change. The proposal is another move by Trump’s DOT to reverse stronger aviation consumer protections that were introduced under the Biden administration.
Under the Biden DOT, then-Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg issued stringent new rules on fining airlines when they violated consumer protection regulations. Those new rules were in part a response to the unprecedented number of consumer complaints the DOT received during the pandemic, when many airlines refused to give passengers refunds for canceled flights.
The Biden DOT ended up fining six airlines $7.5 million in 2022 on top of requiring that they refund $600 million to hundreds of thousands of travelers whose flights were canceled due to covid-19.
Other notable fines from Biden and Buttigieg’s DOT include a $50 million penalty against American Airlines for mistreating passengers with disabilities, as well as a $140 million penalty against Southwest Airlines for its 2022 holiday travel meltdown (the last $11 million installment of which was waived by the Trump administration).
“A robust enforcement program is necessary to protect the rights of the traveling public,” the Biden administration wrote in its 2022 policy. Steep fines were part of Biden and Buttigieg’s enforcement plan “to ensure that its administrative civil penalties are not merely a ‘cost of doing business.’”
Now, that theory appears to be on the brink of being reversed by Trump’s DOT, which claims its new “approach of prioritizing compliance efforts before resorting to enforcement action is a more effective and efficient way to improve the air travel environment for consumers,” the proposal says.
The new policy appears in line with a broader strategy at Trump’s DOT to ease consumer protections in air travel. In addition to waiving certain airline fines leftover from the Biden administration, the Trump’s DOT rolled back other proposed Biden-era regulations in 2025 that would have required carriers to pay passengers up to $750 for certain types of flight delays.
Although potentially discouraging, the new policy doesn’t mean travelers should stop filing complaints with the DOT. The bulk of the office’s investigations and enforcements are based on consumer complaint forms submitted through the DOT’s website.
Airline passengers can submit a complaint when they feel they’ve been unfairly treated by a carrier, paid for a service they did not receive, or any other number of issues that do not involve air travel safety. The DOT then analyzes complaints for patterns of behavior from airlines and decides if penalties are necessary.
The new enforcement policy changes are open to public comment until February 5, 2026, on regulations.gov.
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