Under the leadership of Chairwoman Lina Khan, the Federal Trade Commission has brought 12 merger enforcement actions and 31 consumer-protection actions in the past year, fewer than half of what it brought in 2020.
Lina Khan’s appointment to lead the Federal Trade Commission last June was hailed by progressives as a bold move that would reinvigorate a moribund agency and finally rein in the growing power of large companies in an increasingly concentrated corporate landscape.
But nearly a year into the job, Khan has struggled with sagging morale and declining productivity at the agency, former FTC officials and antitrust experts tell MarketWatch. As a result, they say, the agency’s effectiveness could be at risk.
“This problem demands immediate attention,” Wicker wrote in a May 18 letter to Khan, requesting explanation of the survey results. “If the current level of staff satisfaction persists, turnover at the agency will undoubtedly increase and consumers will ultimately pay the price. The loss of talented lawyers and economists would hamper the FTC’s ability to effectively fulfill its mission to promote competition and protect consumers.
The Federal Trade Commission is governed by a five-member board, appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate, which by law cannot have more than three members of the same political party. Partisan control of the agency therefore depends on who is in the White House. When Chopra arrived in the middle of the Trump administration, he was in the minority as one of two Democrats on the commission.
“Those numbers were surprising just because they were so much lower than I was used to seeing,” said former Bureau of Consumer Protection acting director Kaufman, though he stressed that such figures shouldn’t be used in isolation to judge the agency’s success.
In January, the FTC and the Justice Department launched a public inquiry aimed at modernizing merger guidelines for both horizontal and vertical mergers, after the FTC vote in September to rescind guidelines issued in 2020 on the evaluation of vertical mergers. This sort of new thinking is likely what Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, was referring to when she said a Khan-led FTC would create the opportunity to “make big, structural change by reviving antitrust enforcement and fighting monopolies that threaten our economy, our society and our democracy.”The FTC has not been without major successes during Khan’s tenure, including suing to block Lockheed Martin Corp.’s LMT, +0.16% planned $4.
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