“The Lina Khan approach will quickly die”: Trump FTC pick signals big antitrust changes

President-elect Donald Trump’s nomination of Andrew Ferguson to chair the Federal Trade Commission signals a break from the aggressive stance of the commission under President Joe Biden. Tad Lipsky, a law professor at the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University, told Salon "there’s a lot of chatter going around the antitrust community about this exact issue.” Lipsky, who served in the Justice Department’s antitrust division under President Ronald Reagan as well as on the transition team for Trump after his 2016 victory, told Salon that the big question mark in the incoming antitrust regime is how Slater will act. “I am equally confident that the approach to Big Tech will need to keep the pressure on but we’ll need to see how close that pressure will be tied to traditional antitrust analysis as opposed to companies making decisions based on their political opinions.” The disagreements within the Republican Party over what to do on antitrust, however, run even deeper than what stance the FTC ought to take on issues like noncompete clauses or subscription cancellations. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 also poses the question: “Should the FTC Enforce Antitrust—or Even Continue to Exist?” “Some conservatives think that antitrust enforcement should be invested solely in the Department of Justice,” Project 2025 reads. “Others think that the post–New Deal expansion of the administrative state has had baleful effects upon our society and earnestly share the hope that it can be greatly curtailed if not eliminated—or that its authority can be returned to the states and other democratically accountable political institutions.” The same document goes on to lay out a plan for using the government’s antitrust authority to target companies engaging in “corporate social advocacy”, such as diversity programs and environmental, social and governance programs.