President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President-elect J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) have said they see Big Tech, in particular, as too monopolistic. Alex Brandon/Associated Press
President-elect Donald Trump’s top antitrust policy nominees are eliciting praise from anti-monopolists on the right and left, suggesting the bipartisan skepticism of corporate consolidation that gained traction under President Joe Biden — especially in Big Tech — will continue into the next administration.
“Clearly, antitrust reform and taking on corporate monopolies for their predatory behavior that raises prices and stifles innovation is a bipartisan issue that’s also very popular,” said Sacha Haworth, the executive director of the Tech Oversight Project who moonlights as a Democratic campaign strategist. “It’s not something that seems to be on its way out with the outgoing administration.”
Trump has tapped Gail Slater, a former adviser to Vice President-elect J.D. Vance, as assistant attorney general for the antitrust division of the Department of Justice; announced plans to promote Federal Trade Commissioner Andrew Ferguson to chair of the FTC; and selected antitrust attorney Mark Meador to serve as a third Republican member of the FTC.
“The antitrust left should be ecstatic. The ‘Wu & Khan & Kanter’ mugs could be easily turned into ‘Slater & Ferguson & Meador’ mugs,” said Mike Davis, founder of the conservative Internet Accountability Project, referring to memorabilia some progressives made to commemorate Biden’s selections of Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan, Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust Jonathan Kanter, and Tim Wu as special assistant to the president on technology and competition policy.
Economic progressives derided Trump’s focus on tax cuts for the wealthy and mass deregulation in his first term, and his plans to prioritize similar moves in his second term. These left-of-center advocates are already warning of the potentially disastrous spending cuts that the Department of Government Efficiency, an advisory panel co-led by superrich entrepreneurs Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, is expected to recommend.
At the same time, Trump has nominated at least some officials to top executive branch posts some progressives see as a modest offset to the president-elect’s overall trickle-down approach to managing the economy. He has tapped Lori Chavez-DeRemer, a moderate, pro-labor Republican, to serve as secretary of labor; trade hawk Jamieson Greer to serve as United States trade representative; and Slater, Ferguson, and Meador to handle antitrust policy.
Of course, Trump’s antitrust picks must still withstand confirmation in the Senate. Meador, in particular, is at the mercy of the pro-corporate Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who is set to chair the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation — the panel with authority to approve new nominees to the FTC.
And while progressives have viewed antitrust policy as an area ripe for common ground with Trump, he is still a pro-business Republican whose FTC will be more permissive than the body was under Khan. The business world clearly sees the incoming Trump administration as more open to mergers than Biden’s team was, with bankers expecting more than $4 trillion worth of global mergers and acquisitions next year in part because of Trump’s pro-business approach.
Ferguson’s appointment, in particular, has been panned by even some of the antitrust advocates eager to forge bipartisan cooperation on anti-monopoly policy.
In a one-page memo designed to make the case for his chairmanship directly to Trump, Ferguson sounded like a full-on MAGA culture warrior rather than someone thoughtfully looking to build a cross-ideological coalition. He promised to reverse outgoing FTC Chair Khan’s “anti-business agenda” and to investigate the practices of medical professionals administering gender transition care, but also to “focus antitrust enforcement against Big Tech monopolies.”
As a rank-and-file FTC commissioner, Ferguson voted against the FTC rule banning junk fees, the “click-to-cancel” rule making it easier to unsubscribe from online subscriptions and the rule banning noncompete agreements, which he deemed to be outside of the FTC’s rule-making authority. The noncompete ban, whose fate has been the subject of conflicting decisions in federal court, is now as good as dead.
Asked about the prospect of the Trump administration meaningfully cracking down on monopoly practices across the economy, Matt Stoller, director of research at the American Economic Liberties Project, pointed to what he sees as Trump’s underwhelming antitrust record in his first term. “I assume it’s going to be same-old, same-old, until I see otherwise,” said Stoller, who co-authored an October report comparing Biden and Trump’s antitrust policy records.
A number of antitrust proponents nonetheless see Ferguson’s selection as a major win. These optimists note that he was picked over fellow Republican FTC member Melissa Holyoak, who has a more conventionally pro-corporate attitude toward antitrust policy. Ferguson, by contrast, has spoken about the need to break with the laissez-faire antitrust philosophy of conservative jurist Robert Bork, the key intellectual figure behind lighter enforcement from the 1980s through the 2010s.
And, these antitrust proponents argue, no Republican president would ever appoint someone quite as aggressive as Khan. It’s not even clear that Vice President Kamala Harris would have kept her in place anyway. Harris had signaled she would take a more business-friendly approach to governing than Biden, and several of her top supporters were publicly and privately lobbying for her to cut Khan loose.
“This is a 99th-percentile outcome from our perspective,” said an official from a tech company that has grievances with the Big Tech giants.
Given the tough line Trump’s FTC is likely to take against Big Tech, and possibly other industries — at least relative to other GOP administrations — the antimonopoly tech official expressed hope that Holyoak would leave the FTC before her term is up. Her departure would enable Trump to appoint a third Republican commissioner with a less libertarian view of antitrust enforcement.
What’s more, Slater and Meador — Trump’s other two top antitrust picks — are widely viewed as unadulterated anti-monopolists.
“Gail Slater and Mark Meador are very, very much allies,” said Dan Geldon, a former chief of staff to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who is now an antimonopoly consultant. “I’m cautiously optimistic based on [Trump’s] appointments and public statements to date that he’s going to continue the antimonopoly momentum that has built over the last couple of years.”
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), incoming chair of the Senate Commerce Committee, controls the confirmation processes for Federal Trade Commission nominees. Tom Williams/Getty Images
Slater’s appointment means that the federal government’s court victories against Big Tech are unlikely to be walked back, and ongoing lawsuits are expected to continue full speed ahead. For example, the Biden administration won a lawsuit accusing Google of monopolizing online search and is arguing, among other things, for the federal courts to force Google to spin off its web browser, Chrome, on the grounds that it gives the company’s search engine an unfair advantage. Trump’s first-term DOJ actually initiated that lawsuit in October 2020, and his skepticism of Big Tech suggests he will continue the Biden administration’s effort to press for a dramatic remedy to Google’s violations of antitrust law.
Meador, who was previously an attorney for Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) and an antitrust regulator at the DOJ, has expressed support for antimonopoly policies outside of just the technology industry. In July, he wrote an article in favor of enforcing the Robinson-Patman Act, a New Deal era law that prohibits distributors from giving large chains discounts on products that might enable them to undercut smaller competitors by retailing the products at lower prices. The law has rarely been strictly enforced in recent decades, but antimonopoly experts hold it up as a bulwark against big chain stores wiping out small producers.
Meador has also mocked libertarians for opposing government tyranny but failing to appreciate how private companies can use excessive market power to restrict individuals’ freedoms as well.
The distrust is mutual. Jack Nicastro, a writer at the libertarian outlet Reason, panned Meador in a mid-December takedown that cast his upcoming nomination as “bad news for consumers.” “He has long opposed big business, from Google to Ticketmaster, and regards the free market as merely a means to the end of human flourishing, not as an end in and of itself,” Nicastro wrote, describing a worldview that might make Meador something of an unexpected hero for liberals with a similar stance.
Davis and Garrett Ventry, an antimonopoly Republican lobbyist who is well connected in Trump World, confirmed that Vance played an integral role in vetting and recommending Ferguson, Slater, and Meador. As a senator, Vance sometimes made common cause with progressives in the Senate on questions of corporate power.
“J.D. flexed his muscle and he is someone who has been very hawkish and open-minded and understanding Big Tech, not only on censorship, but on understanding there is a need to rein in these tech companies more broadly,” said Ventry, a former chief of staff to outgoing antimonopoly Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.).
Davis, who is in regular touch with Trump, made sure to emphasize Trump’s role as the final decision-maker and a true believer in curbing Big Tech’s power.
“President Trump picked the antitrust Dream Team in Gail Slater, Andrew Ferguson and Mark Meador,” he said. “And J.D. Vance played a crucial role in that.”
Ventry and Davis also said that Trump made the selections over the objections of more corporate-friendly Republicans in the Senate and on his transition team, though they declined to specify who was lobbying against the picks.
Intra-party tensions over the government’s role in regulating antitrust policies are likely to persist under Trump. Already some antimonopoly advocates are expressing concern that Pam Bondi, Trump’s likely nominee for attorney general, has represented Amazon in the past. They are also concerned that Big Tech CEOs, several of whom have come to kiss Trump’s ring at Mar-a-Lago and contributed to his inauguration festivities, might sway Trump toward their viewpoint.
“Trump has proven himself to be transactional. So that’s why CEOs believe they can just throw their money around and hope to buy influence,” Haworth said. “But I would again point to the nominations of many crusaders against Big Tech in the government, as well as what J.D. Vance supported when he was in the Senate as proof that hopefully this administration cannot be so easily fooled.”
