Tariffs are not the only area of Trump’s economic policy causing confusion in the business world. Corporate executives, investment bankers, and others are struggling to make sense of the administration’s stance on antitrust matters.
At first, it seemed that antitrust would come under assault as part of Trump’s broad offensive against regulation. Project 2025 included a plan for dismantling the Federal Trade Commission, which shares responsibility in this field with the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department. Trump wasted no time in naming Republican commissioner Andrew Ferguson to chair the agency, replacing Lina Khan, who had taken an aggressive approach toward enforcement. Trump subsequently fired the remaining two Democratic commissioners.
Trump’s choice to head the Antitrust Division, Abigail Slater, had earlier in her career been an FTC staff lawyer but then worked for the Internet Association, Big Tech’s trade group. During the first Trump Administration, she served on the National Economic Council and went on to become a policy adviser to JD Vance while he was in the Senate. She was presented as an antitrust hardliner.
Under Ferguson’s leadership, the FTC has seemingly gone in two directions. On the one hand, it seems to have cut back its enforcement activity and has announced only one significant penalty action. At the same time, it has been pursuing a lawsuit originally filed in 2021 accusing Meta Platforms of using unlawful means to crush competition to its social media services.
There has also been ambiguity at the Antitrust Division. It has also announced little in the way of penalties, yet it continued a major lawsuit against Google and recently won a major court ruling that the search engine company has maintained an illegal monopoly over online advertising technology.
The FTC and the DOJ also have the power to block mergers that would improperly limit competition. Surprisingly, the agencies said in February that they would continue to follow the merger guidelines adopted during the Biden Administration. Yet the application of those guidelines have been uneven.
The DOJ sued to block Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s acquisition of Juniper Networks. Capital One’s $35 billion takeover of Discover Financial Services was allowed to proceed. It is unclear whether there will be objections to Google’s proposed $32 billion purchase of the cloud security company Wiz.
The uncertainty over merger policy, together with the tariff chaos, has led to a drop-off in deals. This is bad news for investment bankers and transaction attorneys but not the worst thing for the country.
Overall, the Trump Administration’s antitrust policy has been a lot less harmful than the slash and burn approach to regulatory agencies such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Environmental Protection Agency.
It is notable that the more aggressive actions are directed against a single sector: Big Tech. The efforts of tech executives such as Mark Zuckerberg to ingratiate themselves with the Trump Administration have not paid off.
Although some MAGA figures have promoted the tough-on-tech approach for policy reasons, when it comes to Trump himself, the motivations are probably more personal. He has long harbored resentment against Facebook for banning him in the wake of the January 6 riots. And he complained that Google search results supposedly favor his critics.
Since Trump’s antitrust policies may depend on his whims, they are ultimately unreliable. As with trade, uncertainty will likely remain the order of the day.