From the New York Times, I'm Michael Bobaro.

This is the Daily.

Today, President Biden has declared war on hidden fees that cost American consumers

tens of billions of dollars a year. But as my colleague Jim Tankersley explains, it's doubling as a war

against something else that Biden is finding much harder to defeat. It's Wednesday, May 22nd.

It's Wednesday, May 22nd. Jim, over the past few weeks, the Biden administration has decided to take on airline fees

about as dreaded an enemy as you can imagine and I want you to just

describe what the president has done. Oh Michael I don't know if you do a lot of

flying but when you do fly on an airline, it turns

out there are a lot of additional charges beyond just the price of the ticket.

Now this depends on which airline you fly but a lot of airlines now they ask you to select a seat and they might charge you for your selection or for any selection.

Right. Do they ever they charge you to have the person you travel with sit next to you

and the baby you're traveling with sit next to that person?

Right, exactly. If you want to check a bag on some airlines, that's a fee.

If you want to carry on on some other airlines or with

certain tickets, that's a fee. And so what we have are several airlines that have adopted

sort of a business model where you charge low ticket prices up front but then you add fees throughout

the process and by the end your ticket could double.

Right and just to name a couple names why not spirit frontier that's how they operate sure and then

even the bigger guys like American and United has started charging some more of these

fees too so fees are sort of on the rise across the airline industry.

Okay, enter Joe Biden. Right, so the Biden administration, led by the

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