By DAVID KOENIG, AP Airlines Writer

Members of a U.S. Senate subcommittee took aim at airline executives Wednesday for using an expanding menu of fees to charge customers for early boarding, better seats and other comforts that used to be part of the ticket price.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., said he thinks the federal government should review and perhaps fine the airlines for their use of what he called junk fees.

Blumenthal, the chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, said seat fees were pure profit for the airlines because they don’t have to create new seats or incur other expenses by allowing customers to pick where to sit.

Some senators expressed frustration during Wednesday’s hearing when airline executives could not explain how they set the amount of various fees. They said the vagaries of airline pricing make it hard for consumers to budget for trips.

“We’re all captives on your airplanes at a certain point. You just say, ‘You want to pick seat? We’re just going to charge you some random amount more,’” Sen. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., said. “It would be good if you guys could be transparent about what you do and why.”

The fees don’t seem to be discouraging anybody. Americans are flying more than ever.

The Transportation Security Administration reported screening nearly 3.1 million travelers at airports around the country on Sunday, a new single-day record. The 15 busiest days in TSA history have all occurred this year, with traffic at airport checkpoints up 5% over 2023.

Airline executives bristle at the term “junk fees,” and argue they are merely giving consumers what they want: choices.

“Our customers who prioritize affordability have the option to choose a lower-fare product and, in doing so, opt out of paying for additional services that they do not want,” Andrew Nocella, the chief commercial officer of United Airlines, said in testimony prepared for the panel’s hearing. “But we also have customers who seek more services, and they retain the ability to choose the services they value, for an incremental fee, like a seat with extra legroom or checked bags.”

As traffic passes by in the foreground, a United Airlines jetliner turns on the tarmac to leave the A Concourse and head to a runway at Denver International Airport Tuesday, Nov. 26, 2024, in Denver. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski)

Nocella agreed with critics who say fees should not come as a surprise to passengers but need to be transparent and described clearly during the ticket-buying process.

Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., criticized Frontier Airlines and Spirit Airlines for paying employees $26 million in bonuses for spotting customers whose carry-on bags were too big, forcing the customers to pay another fee. Spirit charges between $15 and $77 for a carry-on bag that won’t fit under a seat.

“If people want to know why it’s such a terrible experience to fly, this is news for them today,” Hawley told the airlines executives Wednesday. “Your airlines are paying millions of dollars to your employees to harass people who have already paid!”

U.S. airlines raised more than $7 billion from fees on checked bags last year, with American Airlines and United Airlines leading the pack. They scooped up another $1 billion in ticket-change and cancellation fees, although that was about one-third of what they raised before the coronavirus pandemic, when the biggest airlines dropped change fees.

Exact figures on other types of fees are hard to determine, but the Senate panel reported last week that United, American, Delta Air Lines, Frontier and Spirit collected a combined total of more than $12 billion in seat fees between 2018 and 2023. That included charges for things such as more legroom or an aisle seat near the front of the plane.

The panel was scheduled to hear Wednesday from Nocella, American chief strategy officer Steve Johnson, Delta chief external affairs officer Peter Carter, and the chief commercial officers of Frontier and Spirit.

Airline fees have been a frequent target of criticism by the Biden administration, all the way up to President Joe Biden.

A Transportation Department rule that took effect in October requires airlines to make automatic cash refunds for tickets and fees when flights are canceled. The airline industry is suing to block another regulation requiring more prominent disclosure of baggage and cancellation fees. An appeals court has blocked that rule, and its fate is uncertain under President-elect Donald Trump.

The airline industry and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg are continuing their fight over fees and other regulations, even after the November election.

By PETER SMITH

It was a history-making event: In a chapel at Fort Liberty, North Carolina, 2nd Lt. Khady Ndiaye stood proudly — wearing a hijab – as she became the first Muslim woman commissioned by the U.S. Army as a chaplain candidate.

Presiding over the ceremony in June was Maj. Gen. Bill Green, the Army’s chief of chaplains. He said the chaplains serve more than 200 faith groups, “while caring for the entire Army family … regardless of their personal beliefs.”

That ethos – a commitment to religious diversity throughout a U.S. military with 1.3 million active-duty troops — could be strained if Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for defense secretary, is confirmed as the next Pentagon leader.

Hegseth sometimes conveys his conservative Christian outlook in militaristic terms, has justified the medieval Crusades that pitted Christians against Muslims, and evokes the specter of Islamists seeking to impose their faith on non-Muslims. He has denounced the military’s initiatives to foster diversity, equity and inclusion, which include religion among other categories.

Today’s military “is one of the most diverse institutions in American society, racially, ethnically and especially religiously,” said Ronit Stahl, author of “Enlisting Faith: How the Military Chaplaincy Shaped Religion and State in Modern America.”

“Overall, the military was an engine of religious inclusion and really thinking about how to manage religious pluralism, but it was not a smooth or easy process,” said Stahl, a professor of history at the University of California at Berkeley. “To have a secretary of defense who promulgates a worldview or operates within a worldview where not just Christianity, but a certain strand of Christianity, is the right religion, potentially changes the tenor of what an ethos of religious pluralism looks like in the military.”

The military chaplaincy has evolved as America has diversified. It originally functioned with mainline Protestant and Catholic chaplains, expanding during World War I to include such groups as Jews and Mormons.

Recent decades have seen the military’s first Muslim, Hindu and Buddhist chaplains. The military has also made accommodations such as allowing Sikhs to maintain their religiously mandated turbans and beards.

Today, about 70% of active-duty military identify as Christian – including about 20% Catholic and about half Protestant or other Christian, according to a 2019 congressional report. About a quarter of troops were listed as “other/unclassified/unknown,” with small percentages of atheists/agonistics, Jews, Muslims and adherents of Eastern religions.

The Defense Department could not immediately confirm the figures. But they roughly match Americans’ religious demographics overall.

Today, the Army’s careers-and-jobs website depicts its chaplaincy as “a multi-faith program — ministers, priests, imams, rabbis, and more.”

The mission for its chaplains: “Observe the distinct doctrines of your faith while honoring other denominations and ensuring the right for others to observe their own.”

Rabbi Scott Klein. who serves as an Army chaplain within the 82nd Airborne Division and is garrison rabbi at Fort Liberty, said the military “has made significant strides in fostering an interfaith environment.”

“One area where I think we can continue to improve is in education and training,” he said via email. “Providing more opportunities for service members to learn about different faith traditions would further break down barriers and misconceptions.”

The U.S. Navy reports that it has 874 chaplains. Most have a range of Protestant affiliations, including 101 Southern Baptists. They also include 46 Catholics, 18 Latter-day Saints, 12 Jewish, 9 Eastern Orthodox, 4 Muslim and 1 Buddhist. Statistics from other branches were not immediately available.

Hegseth’s nomination requires confirmation from the Senate, where he’s facing deepening scrutiny over other controversies. He is subject to multiple allegations that have emerged in the media about alcohol intoxication at work events, sexual misconduct and potential financial mismanagement. He was flagged as a possible “Insider Threat” by a fellow service member in 2021.

Hegseth, now a Fox News host and author, is an Army National Guard veteran of deployments to Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay.

He has written of America as a Judeo-Christian nation, portraying the founders as Christians despite what historians say were their diverse religious views. He said Americans of any religion are welcome in a “righteous crusade for human freedom,” though he often fuses Christian and American identity. “We Christians — alongside our Jewish friends and their remarkable army in Israel — need to pick up the sword of unapologetic Americanism and defend ourselves,” he wrote in his 2020 book, “American Crusade.”

Mikey Weinstein, president of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, said Hegseth “promotes the concept of fundamentalist Christian dominance and supremacy.”

Weinstein, an Air Force veteran, said military personnel have the right to practice and proclaim their faith – but within constitutional restrictions on the “time, place and manner” of such expressions.

“Christian nationalists like Hegseth believe there are no limits on when they can deploy their faith,” Weinstein said.

But other veterans are supporting Hegseth, including Damon Friedman, a retired 20-year Marine and Air Force veteran who now leads SOF Missions, a Florida-based program aiming to reduce veteran suicides.

Friedman, who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, said he shares Hegseth’s Christian faith. That didn’t interfere with his duty to lead troops regardless of their religion, he said.

“We live in a free country. We get warriors of all faiths,” said Friedman, a retired lieutenant colonel.

He favors Hegseth’s goal of rolling back diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, which he contended is causing the military to focus on members’ various identities rather than on solidarity in being a “war-fighting machine.”

“We just need to get back to being green,” he said, referring to the primary uniform color.

Sen. Bill Hagerty, R-Tennessee, concurred.

“We need to get back to business, and I think Pete is just the person to do it,” Hagerty said recently on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos″ .

Some concerns about Hegseth center on his views toward Islam and the religious motivations he cites for supporting Israel.

He has spoken enthusiastically about the possibility of a restored Jewish temple on its ancient site in Jerusalem. Such a move would involve the geopolitically explosive step of displacing the Al-Aqsa Mosque – one of Islam’s holiest sites and a symbol of Palestinian aspirations.

Hegseth made his comments at a 2018 conference in Jerusalem. He rejected Palestinian aspirations for statehood, saying there is “no such thing as the outcome of a two-state solution, there is one state.”

Hegseth bears a prominent tattoo proclaiming “Deus Vult,” (“God Wills It”), the Latin phrase attributed to the 11th century pope who called the First Crusade. That launched two centuries of fierce, intermittent warfare between Christian and Muslim armies in and around the Holy Land.

Hegseth wrote in his book that he wasn’t romanticizing the Crusades and but said the “present moment is much like the eleventh century.” He called for Christians, Jews and the Israeli army to “push Islamism back,” culturally and when necessary militarily.

He defined Islamism as an ideology imposing Islam on others. He contended that moderate Muslims may be peaceful but are either “complicit in Islamism’s expansion or impotent to reverse it.”

The Council on American-Islamic Relations opposes Hegseth’s nomination.

“If President-Elect Trump is serious about pursuing peace abroad and putting American interests above the interests of foreign governments, he should reconsider Mr. Hegseth’s nomination,” the Muslim advocacy organization said.

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Thomas Lecaque, a professor of history at Grand View University, said the “Deus Vult” expression is unambiguously militant.

“There is no version of ’Deus Vult’ that means anything other than a call for violence,” said Lecaque, who studies religious violence from the Crusades to modern America.

The Trump-Vance transition team did not return emails seeking comment. Emails to Hegseth and his attorney also did not receive replies.

Larry Wilkerson, a retired colonel with 31 years in the military and an advisory board member of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, said Hegseth is an alarming choice.

“Diversity is a strength, but you’ve got to know how to lead it,” said Wilkerson, a former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell. “You don’t do it by forcing the majority’s or even a large minority’s views on them.”

The Minnesota Department of Management and Budget expects a $616 million balance for the state in 2027 — about $1.1 billion less than prior estimates, according to their November forecast. Though the state will be spending more money than it is taking in, something known in state budget talk as a “structural imbalance.”

The imbalance is due to projected reductions in income and sales tax revenues combined with higher spending for long-term care and special education.

State budget officials have warned of looming shortfalls since last December. While February projections showed the state still had a $3.7 billion surplus for the current two-year budget cycle of 2023-2025, state lawmakers will have to limit future spending to keep the budget balanced, they said.

More complete details, such as the state budget balance for the upcoming budget cycle, are to come later Wednesday. Budget department officials are presenting the complete report to the public starting at 11:45 a.m., with Gov. Tim Walz and legislative leaders set to speak afterward.

MMB releases budget projections for the coming year each December as the Legislature prepares to convene in January or February. The projections give the governor and Legislature an early idea of the resources they’ll have to work with in the coming session. This coming year they have to craft a new two-year budget.

Democratic-Farmer-Labor-controlled state government last passed a more than $70 million budget in 2023, which grew spending by nearly 40% from the last budget cycle and used much of the record $18 billion surplus.

Check back for updates to this developing story. 

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