Spirit Airlines is dead, but the finger-pointing is very much alive, Axios' Dan Primack writes.

• Trump administration officials are blaming former President Biden, whose Justice Department blocked JetBlue from buying Spirit for $3.8 billion.
• Spirit told the White House to look in the mirror, saying its insolvency was sparked by spiking jet fuel prices amid the Iran war.

Those are both legitimate arguments. But they aren't mutually exclusive.

• It's hard to claim that keeping JetBlue and Spirit apart has preserved low-cost competition when Spirit planes are now parked like yellow school buses at midnight.
• It's also true that jet fuel prices were the straw that broke Spirit's back.

⛽️ Yet there were other contributing factors:

1. Spirit didn't sufficiently hedge its jet fuel costs. That speaks to poor management, or maybe to being over-leveraged.
2. Ongoing issues with Pratt & Whitney engines caused Spirit to ground a bunch of planes, creating significant losses.
3. Spirit bailed on a merger agreement with Frontier in order to pursue the JetBlue tie-up. It's possible Biden's DOJ would have let Spirit merge with Frontier, which was significantly smaller than JetBlue.

💸 The bottom line: It's impossible to know if a JetBlue-Spirit merger would have saved Spirit — or saddled the combined carrier with so much debt that it too would be liquidating as jet fuel prices climb.

• Go deeper ... Get Axios Pro Rata.

The 2026 Service to America Medals honor people and teams across the federal government "whose accomplishments demonstrate the vital role that expert, apolitical civil servants play in our daily lives."

• The awards, aka the "Sammies," are run by the nonprofit, nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service.

This year's winners:

👾 Gharun Lacy, State Department.

• Lacy led a team that stopped a cyber intrusion into State Department email accounts.

🛰️ James Szykman, EPA.

• Szykman led a cross-agency effort that validated NASA's TEMPO satellite, paving the way for better air pollution monitoring.

💵 Jill A. Frisch, ex-IRS.

• Frisch litigated landmark cases against multinational corporations that used complex schemes to artificially lower their tax bills.

🐄 Ransom L. Baldwin VI, Ph.D., Curtis P. Van Tassell, Ph.D., Paul VanRaden, Ph.D., and the ARS Dairy Cattle Genetic Enhancement Team, Department of Agriculture.

• The team played a leading role in revolutionizing dairy cattle breeding through DNA research.

Go deeper.

1. 📰 AP won a Pulitzer Prize for an investigation into mass surveillance tools and their impact in China, Reuters won for reporting on President Trump's expansion of executive power, and The Minnesota Star Tribune won for coverage of a shooting at a Catholic school. The Washington Post won for scrutinizing Trump administration cuts to federal agencies. And Miami Herald reporter Julie K. Brown received a special citation "for her groundbreaking reporting ... that exposed Jeffrey Epstein's systematic abuse of young women." Links to winners ... Watch the announcement.
2. 💊 The Supreme Court temporarily restored mail-order prescribing of the widely used abortion drug mifepristone, pausing an appeals court decision that dramatically limited access. Go deeper.
3. 🏥 Former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani is recovering from pneumonia, spokesperson Ted Goodman wrote on X today: "He remains in critical but stable condition. Please keep the prayers coming." Go deeper.
4. ⚾️ Legendary Yankees radio announcer John Sterling died today at 87. Sterling called more than 5,600 games, including an unbroken run of 5,060 regular-season matchups until his 81st birthday. N.Y. Times obit.

Christopher Nolan's "Interstellar" is now the most-watched film on Letterboxd, the popular social movie platform.

• Over 7.4 million users say they've seen the 2014 sci-fi epic, starring Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway.

🎥 The film got mixed reviews on release. But many Nolan fans now consider it one of his best works — and a landmark achievement in filmmaking.

• See the rankings.