She wielded one of the world’s most powerful government departments, the Federal Trade Commission, to challenge big corporate mergers and to issue new regulations intending to give workers and consumers more rights.
Business leaders, consequently, wanted her fired. And with the incoming Trump administration, they’re going to get what they wanted.
On Tuesday, President-elect Donald Trump announced he will elevate Andrew Ferguson, a current Republican commissioner on the FTC, to be the agency’s chair. Trump said he will also nominate Mark Meador, a former antitrust staffer for Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee, as an FTC commissioner.
Trump’s decision will likely be welcome news for some businesses, but certainly not all, and least of all for Big Tech — whom Ferguson has sharply criticized and, in the case of Google, has gone to court against while serving as Virginia’s solicitor general.
Here’s where Ferguson’s record suggests the FTC may be headed under his leadership.
Anti-monopoly, anti-regulation
A former aide to Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, Ferguson has been an outspoken critic of large monopolies. He has backed calls for a nationwide data privacy law and he has called concentration in the technology industry “the competition question of our time.”
All of these things suggest some alignment with the current FTC’s priorities, particularly in recognizing the role that tech companies play in the modern economy and the importance of vigorously enforcing the nation’s antitrust laws.
His biggest differences with Khan have been on what they see as the power of the FTC itself, and whether or not it can rein in corporations by writing regulation, or if it would need to wait for a deadlocked Congress to pass legislation first.
Ferguson broke with Khan, for example, on the FTC’s groundbreaking nationwide rule banning clauses in worker contracts that stop them from leaving one employer and working for a competitor. The 2024 rule, which immediately triggered objections from business leaders who called it a government power grab, was not within the FTC’s authority to create, Ferguson wrote in a dissent.
“We are not a legislature; we are an administrative agency wielding only the power lawfully conferred on us by Congress,” Ferguson wrote.
The dissent reflects a deep and longstanding disagreement between Democrats and Republicans over the scope of the FTC Act — the congressional charter laying out the commission’s powers. In this situation, Ferguson argued that the “best interpretation” of the law was that it only empowered the FTC to make rules governing itself, not private businesses.
With Ferguson at the helm, the FTC appears poised to continue prosecuting monopoly and consumer protection cases, including the antitrust case to break up Meta filed during the first Trump administration and a pair of cases against Amazon.
Underlining the odds Ferguson will be tough on tech is his past role as Virginia solicitor general, wherein he, the Justice Department and a number of other states sued Google for monopolizing the market for digital ad technology. This major case targeted the $31 billion portion of Google’s business that matches website publishers with advertisers, and went to trial this fall. A decision could be handed down within weeks.
But, critically, Ferguson seems likely to steer clear of the types of sweeping rulemaking that Khan had championed.
‘Free speech’
It’s also becoming apparent that Ferguson may seek to wield the nation’s antitrust laws as a tool to force social media platforms to promote conservative speech even more than they do.
It’s unclear how far that effort may go in the courts, but Ferguson foreshadowed his intent in congressional testimony last year and again in a statement following Trump’s
