Originally published at: Red state AGs want Justice to review rail merger - FreightWaves
A coalition of GOP Attorney Generals have asked the Department of Justice to review the proposed Union Pacific-Norfolk Southern merger.
DOJ political??? Say it ain’t so! The same political ecosystem that removed Robert E. Primus—the lone dissenting voice on the Surface Transportation Board—now suddenly discovers its inner antitrust purist? Gosh. What a remarkable and entirely coincidental awakening of principle.
For decades, Washington presided over the systematic dismantling of coordinated freight governance. The Interstate Commerce Commission was sunset in 1995. The Motor Carrier Act and Staggers Act deregulated their respective domains. The Interstate Highway System remained untolled, its real costs quietly absorbed by the public balance sheet. Railroads were left to maintain their infrastructure privately while competing against a trucking system built, engineered, and subsidized as a national strategic asset.
That framework did not emerge accidentally. It was constructed deliberately—by Congress, administered by federal agencies, and defended by the same political machinery that now expresses theatrical concern over consolidation.
And yet now, suddenly, consolidation is treated as an existential threat.
Where was this urgency when the number of Class I railroads fell from 33 to 6? Where was this alarm when trucking fragmented into hundreds of thousands of lightly governed motor carriers operating on publicly funded pavement? Where was this newfound reverence for “competition” when the institutional mechanisms required to sustain balanced, multimodal freight policy were quietly dismantled?
Now we are told the Department of Justice must intervene. That political actors must ensure “competition” is preserved. That regulators must stand vigilant.
Forgive the skepticism.
The freight system did not become structurally imbalanced because of a single merger application filed in December 2025. It became imbalanced through forty years of policy drift, regulatory retreat, and political convenience. Railroads internalized their infrastructure costs. Highways socialized theirs. Trucking proliferated under diffuse oversight. Rail consolidated under capital discipline.
The result is not a ■■■■■■■■■■. It is an outcome.
And now, when one railroad seeks to stitch together an end-to-end network that might actually compete with the highway system Congress built to supplant it, Washington suddenly rediscovers its regulatory conscience.
The irony would be amusing if it were not so consequential.
This is not about defending Union Pacific or Norfolk Southern as corporations. It is about recognizing the structural architecture policymakers themselves created. The merger is not the cause of the system’s imbalance. It is a symptom of it. And the political theater now unfolding—letters, reviews, warnings, and performative outrage—cannot obscure the deeper reality.
The system Washington built is now behaving exactly as designed.
And now Washington is shocked.
Shocked.