Regulation

Debunking Debanking

There are plenty of reasons to be critical of the big banks. They hit customers with illegitimate fees. They misuse personal information. They pay meager interest on savings accounts. They do too little to help struggling mortgage holders. Some such as Wells Fargo have a history of creating bogus accounts to generate revenue. Many have been accused of manipulating foreign exchange markets, enabling tax evasion by the wealthy, and helping bring the U.S. economy to the brink of collapse in the late 2000s.

In Violation Tracker, Bank of America has by far the largest cumulative penalty total: $87 billion. JPMorgan Chase is second with $40 billion; Wells Fargo and Citigroup are also among the ten most penalized corporations.

Apparently oblivious to all this, Donald Trump recently launched a tirade against the banks that focused on a bizarre accusation: that they refuse to do business with people with right-wing political views, especially Trump himself.

In an interview with CNBC, Trump claimed that JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America had refused to accept deposits from his company after his first term as president. “The Banks discriminated against me very badly,” he moaned.

Trump’s account may very well have been fictional. If not, it conveniently ignores the idea that the banks may have shunned him because he was a bad credit risk, and for a period of time after January 6 there was a chance he would end up in prison.

Aside from his personal grievances, Trump’s comments appear to be connected to a move by his administration to address what right-wingers claim is a practice of “debanking” – denying banking services to people based on their political views. There is, of course, no evidence that banks apply an ideological litmus test to potential customers.

Instead, the debanking assault seems to be an effort to undermine rules governing transactions with individuals who might be connected to illegal activities such as money laundering and the financing of terrorist activities. As part of their due diligence, banks are supposed to consult lists of people who may be tied to such activities.

During the Obama and Biden Administrations there were also efforts to discourage banks from doing business with crooked operators in areas such as payday lending and cryptocurrencies. These efforts, known as Operation Choke Point, have come under frequent criticism from MAGA world.

The banks themselves would like to weaken their due diligence obligations. That probably explains why they chose not to scoff at Trump’s criticism. A JPMorgan spokesperson said: “We agree with President Trump that regulatory change is desperately needed.”

If anything, the regulations governing bank practices need to be more stringent. All too often, financial institutions are found to be deficient in their anti-money-laundering efforts. U.S. and foreign banks have paid out billions of dollars in fines and settlements to resolve cases brought by federal and state regulators.

Big banks have also been accused of doing business with disreputable individuals such as one very much in the news these days: the late Jeffrey Epstein. In 2023 JPMorgan Chase paid $290 million to settle a lawsuit brought by victims of Epstein who alleged that the bank turned a blind eye to indications of his sex trafficking because he was such a lucrative client.

If debanking means that financial services are denied to the likes of Jeffrey Epstein, I’m all for it.

The Attack on Independent Business Regulation

Donald Trump has a great fondness for the policies of the late 19^th Century, praising that period’s focus on tariffs and its lack of a federal income tax. Yet there is another practice from that time that Trump abhors: independent regulatory agencies.

In 1887 Congress created the Interstate Commerce Commission to oversee the railroad industry, which then played a commanding role in the economy and was not known for having high ethical standards. The ICC was not completely autonomous—the president appointed its members—and it had some significant flaws, but the agency was the beginning of a system in which federal oversight of business would take place outside the direct control of the White House.

Part of the Trump Administration’s campaign to remake the federal government is the elimination of independent regulation. In February, Trump signed an executive order taking a significant step in that direction by giving the Office of Management and Budget extensive powers to oversee the agencies. He has gone on to fire their Democratic commissioners, brazenly violating the legal requirement of bipartisanship in the running of those entities and a 90-year-old Supreme Court ruling that presidents cannot fire board members without just cause.

Unfortunately, the current Supreme Court has shown no inclination to block Trump’s power grab. It has just allowed him to proceed with the dismissal of three commissioners at the Consumer Product Safety Commission. This ruling, issued as part of the Court’s ever-expanding shadow docket, followed a similar decision allowing Trump to remove a Democrat from the National Labor Relations Board. Trump has also fired commissioners at agencies such as the Federal Trade Commission and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. And, of course, he is openly weighing whether to illegally fire Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell; the Fed is a banking regulator as well as being in charge of monetary policy.

Aside from the general issue of undue consolidation of presidential power, Trump’s moves at the independent agencies are likely to be detrimental to the oversight process itself.

It is true that the agencies have a mixed record when it comes to enforcement. Entities such as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission have traditionally been too close to the industries they were supposed to oversee. On the other hand, independent agencies have brought major actions against major companies for various kinds of violations. The FTC, for example, has imposed multi-billion-dollar penalties on Meta Platforms and Volkswagen.

Trump, of course, is exerting more power over the agencies not to make them more aggressive but rather to weaken their oversight, especially when it comes to companies favored by the Administration. Or else he is seeking to turn the agencies into weapons against those he disfavors. This is seen most clearly at the FCC, whose Trump-appointed head Brendan Carr, is an eager MAGA partisan.

Overall, Trump’s campaign against independent regulation is an enormous gift to Big Business and a serious setback for consumers, workers, and communities depending on those agencies for some measure of protection against corporate misconduct.

The FCC Betrays Its Diversity Legacy

The Federal Communications Commission has scored another victory in the campaign to use its regulatory powers to promote the MAGA goal of stamping out all vestiges of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the private sector. T-Mobile, which is seeking FCC approval of two fiber and wireless deals, has announced it will shut down all its DEI programs.

The company announced the move in an obsequious letter to FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, a contributor to Project 2025 and an unabashed Trump loyalist. It wrote: “We remain fully committed to ensuring that T-Mobile does not have any policies or practices that enable invidious discrimination, whether in fulfillment of DEI or any other purpose,” adding that the company is ending its DEI-related policies “not just in name, but in substance.”

T-Mobile’s move comes about two months after Verizon, also seeking regulatory approvals, issued a similar renunciation of DEI. That, in turn, came after the FCC announced it would investigate DEI at major media companies.

While anti-DEI pressures can be found throughout the Trump Administration, it is particularly troubling to see them at the FCC. That is because the agency has a long history of policies to combat discrimination and promote diversity in the communications industry.

Those policies came about primarily through the efforts of non-profit groups with close ties to the civil rights movement. Chief among these was the Office of Communications of the United Church of Christ, now known as the UCC Media Justice Ministry. In the 1960s, the UCC effort, led by Dr. Everett C. Parker, began to research the way in which television and radio stations in the South covered the campaigns for racial justice.

The UCC found that stations such as WLBT-TV in Jackson, Mississippi mostly ignored the protests while frequently airing pejorative comments about African-Americans. The UCC petitioned the FCC to deny the station a license renewal because it was not serving the public interest, as broadcasters were required to do under federal law. After a lengthy legal battle, the UCC won a landmark court ruling.

Around the same time, the UCC successfully pressured the FCC to adopt equal employment regulations for license holders. Those rules were modified by a 1998 court ruling, but the agency continued not only to prohibit discrimination but also require broadcasters to take positive steps to promote the hiring and promotion of minorities and women. Operations with larger staffs were expected to engage in more initiatives than smaller ones.

The current FCC’s policies turn this tradition on its head. By embracing the wrong-headed idea that efforts to address discrimination are themselves discriminatory, the agency is starting to turn back the clock to a time when people of color were largely absent from the staffs of media companies.

It is also concerning to see a regulatory agency distort its mission by using its power for ideological purposes. We can only wonder how much the FCC’s anti-DEI efforts are taking resources away from its legitimate enforcement practices.

T-Mobile, for instance, certainly deserves plenty of scrutiny. Last year, it paid over $4 million to state attorneys general to resolve allegations of misleading advertising practices. The year before, it paid $350 million to settle a class action lawsuit over its failure to prevent a massive customer data breach. The Biden FCC fined the company another $80 million in the data case.

Pursuing matters such as these as well as conducting honest evaluations of proposed mergers should be the focus on the FCC–not engaging in culture war attacks.

Delivering Corporate Misconduct

When we go online to order dinner, we are getting a lot more delivered than a bowl of Pad Thai. As they bring in billions of dollars in revenue, leading app-based services such as DoorDash and Grubhub are being compelled to pay out millions in fines and settlements to resolve wide-ranging allegations of misconduct.

As shown in Violation Tracker, U.S. market leader DoorDash has accumulated more than $43 million in penalties. Most of that has come in the past year. In February, the company paid over $16 million to settle allegations by the New York State Attorney General that it misled both consumers and delivery workers by using tips intended for workers to subsidize their guaranteed pay. A few months earlier, DoorDash agreed to pay over $11 million to resolve a similar case brought by the Illinois AG.

Around the same time, the Illinois AG and the Federal Trade Commission got Grubhub to pay over $25 million over its alleged deceptive business practices that harmed customers, delivery drivers, and restaurants. Grubhub, now owned by Wonder Group, allegedly misled consumers about the cost of delivery and the benefits of a Grubhub Plus subscription; misled drivers about the amount of money they could make; and listed restaurants on Grubhub’s app without their knowledge or consent, and in some instances, over their explicit objections.

The other giant of the U.S. market, Uber Eats, accounts for a portion of the $917 million in penalties paid by its parent Uber Technologies. For example, in 2022 the City of Chicago got the company to pay over $6 million to restaurants for overcharging commissions and for listing some establishments without their permission.

Delivery service misconduct is not limited to the United States. Recently, the European Commission fined the German company Delivery Hero, which operates in about 60 countries, the equivalent of $253 million for engaging in anti-competitive practices. As shown in Violation Tracker Global, that brought the penalty total for Delivery Hero and its subsidiaries to nearly $600 million. That includes fines for labor standards violations in Spain, privacy violations in Italy, consumer protection violations in Hungary, and antitrust violations in Chile.

DoorDash has faced legal challenges in its foreign operations as well. Recently, the company was fined the equivalent of about $1.3 million by the Australian government for sending over one million texts and emails which breached spam rules. It is being sued by the Canadian government for allegedly advertising misleading prices and discounts. DoorDash is in the process of acquiring its rival Deliveroo, which was fined by the French government in 2022 for abusing the freelance status of delivery workers.

Similar allegations have dogged other services such as Colombia-based Rappi, which has been fined in its home country as well as in places such as Argentina, Brazil, and Peru. Singapore-based Grab Holdings has paid several consumer protection fines in the Philippines. Last year, the government of India ordered Zomato to pay the equivalent of $90 million in taxes and fines for non-payment of certain taxes.

Food delivery is one of the world’s youngest industries, yet it already has one of the worst records for regulatory compliance. It remains to be seen whether governments can rein it in.

The Other Face of EU Business Regulation

There is a common assumption in some circles that Europe is a regulatory nightmare for business. Resentment toward Brussels bureaucrats was a prime motivating factor for Brexit, and today U.S. high tech firms complain about being pressured over antitrust and data protection issues. Claims about regulatory overreach are part of the MAGA distaste for all things European.

A report I just published with my colleagues at Good Jobs First challenges this depiction of EU practices. Entitled Europe’s Biggest Corporate Lawbreakers at Home and Abroad, the report draws on data collected for Violation Tracker Global to show that in many ways EU regulatory enforcement lags behind other countries, especially the United States.

We found that large multinational corporations based in the European Union have been paying far more in regulatory penalties outside the EU than inside. Since the beginning of 2010, EU companies have paid the equivalent of US$43 billion (about EUR 37 billion) in fines and settlements in cases brought by the European Commission and member-state regulators. This is less than half of the US$104 billion (EUR 91 billion) those companies paid in the rest of the world.

Among the 445 EU corporations included in the analysis, the average company paid $95 million in total penalties for cases brought in the EU, far less than the average of $234 million per company for cases brought elsewhere. Volkswagen, the European company with the most worldwide penalties, paid only $5.7 billion of its $30.3 billion total in the EU.

When the penalties of the EU-based parent companies are looked at by industry, the largest total by far comes from the financial services sector. Of the $58 billion in penalties paid by EU-based financial services corporations worldwide, only 12% involved cases brought by regulators in the EU. Deutsche Bank, the most penalized European bank paid only $1.1 billion of its $16.7 billion total in the EU.

When the penalties of the EU parents are analyzed according to the category of the offense, financial offenses are at the top, with a total of $50 billion. Only 11% of this amount came from cases in the EU.

By contrast, 63% of the $47 billion the companies paid in penalties for competition-related offenses came from cases brought either by the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Competition or authorities in member states. European regulators also account for most of the penalties paid by EU companies for data protection offenses.

The United States accounts for two-thirds of the total penalties paid by companies headquartered in the EU. Six of the 10 most penalized EU companies in the U.S.—including Allianz, BNP Paribas, and Deutsche Bank–have paid over 90% of their total fines and settlements to U.S. regulators and prosecutors.

In short, there are two faces of EU regulation: In the areas of competition and privacy there is aggressive enforcement with numerous high-profile cases against large corporations with substantial penalties. In other categories, there are far fewer major cases. As a result, large EU-based corporations are facing much lighter overall penalties closer to home than they face abroad, especially in the United States.

This reality is largely being ignored by EU policymakers, increasing numbers of whom are being swayed by the anti-regulatory zealots. Last year, the EU adopted the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive, which established more rigorous disclosure requirements about human rights and environmental practices in corporate operations and supply chains.

This year, the EU is backtracking. It adopted an Omnibus package that weakens the reporting rules and limits the number of companies that need to comply. Our report argues that this reversal is a mistake and argues in favor of more robust disclosure and enforcement.

A Company’s MAGA-Style Attack on a Regulatory Agency

Normally, when a company reaches a settlement with a regulatory agency, that is the end of the matter. Gemini Trust, a cryptocurrency exchange, has another idea.

In January, Gemini agreed to pay a $5 million fine to resolve a case brought by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission alleging the company made false statements during an investigation relating to its exchange and futures contracts. Gemini neither admitted nor denied the misconduct.

Now Gemini is attacking the CFTC by filing a pugnacious complaint with the agency’s inspector general. The 13-page document alleges that the CFTC’s Enforcement Division is “out of control and that its culture is toxic.” It claims that agency staffers were “not motivated by a principled application of the law or desire to protect the commodities markets. Rather, these lawyers were driven by a selfish desire to advance their careers by misusing their offices to obtain a high-profile ‘win.’”

Gemini’s complaint criticizes by name the lead CFTC lawyer on the case, who is accused of making false statements about the matter in the bio posted on the website of the law firm he joined after leaving the agency.

The facts of the Gemini case are complicated. I will not attempt to summarize them or assess the validity of the CFTC’s case.

What concerns me is whether Gemini’s move is a sign of things to come as companies feel emboldened by the anti-regulatory rhetoric of the Trump Administration to assail regulators in unprecedented ways. The Gemini complaint incorporates MAGA-style rhetoric by accusing the CFTC of seeking to “weaponize and tilt the scales of justice in its favor” and engaging in “trophy-hunting lawfare.”

It is worth noting that the CFTC case is not the only time Gemini, which was founded by the Winklevoss brothers, known for their legal disputes with Mark Zuckerberg, has run afoul of regulators.

Last year, in a settlement with the New York Department of Financial Services, Gemini agreed to return at least $1.1 billion to customers and pay a $37 million fine to resolve allegations it failed to conduct due diligence on Genesis Global Capital, an unregulated third party that allowed Gemini customers to loan their virtual currency and receive interest payments. Genesis defaulted on its loans and declared bankruptcy in 2023.

Also last year, Gemini agreed to pay $50 million to resolve allegations it misled thousands of investors on the risks associated with one of its investment programs.

Given the way the Trump Administration and Congressional Republicans are boosting cryptocurrency, it is not surprising that a company such as Gemini would feel confident in going after one of the main agencies involved in oversight of the business.

It is unclear what Gemini expects to accomplish with its complaint. The CFTC has already been weakened by the departure of many staff members since the new administration took office. The man Trump has nominated to head the agency is Brian Quintenz, who served as a commissioner during the first Trump administration and who has close ties to the cryptocurrency industry. On his X social media page he describes himself as a “financial freedom advocate.” An analysis published in the National Law Review said that his nomination “portends a potential shift towards a more business-friendly regulatory approach.”

Perhaps Gemini is paving the way for Quintenz, who would initially run the commission single-handledly, to rescind the settlement and return the $5 million. This would be another unfortunate step in the Trump Administration’s effort to rewrite the history of enforcement at the same time that it undermines its future.

Removing the Wrong Shackles

Over the past decade, Wells Fargo has been a poster child for corporate greed and misconduct. In 2016 the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau revealed that the bank had been ordering its employees to create unauthorized accounts for existing customers in order to generate illegitimate fees.

The CFPB fined Wells Fargo $100 million in what would be the first in a series of enforcement actions and lawsuits that have cost the bank more than $8 billion in penalties for the bogus accounts and other offenses such as improper foreclosures and overdraft fees. Along with those monetary punishments, in 2018 the Federal Reserve took the unusual step of putting a limit on the bank’s ability to increase its assets until it improved its governance and internal controls.

Now, in 2025, the CFPB has effectively been dismantled by the Trump Administration’s anti-regulatory steamroller, while the Fed just announced it is removing the asset limit. According to the bank regulator, “the removal of the growth restriction reflects the substantial progress the bank has made in addressing its deficiencies.”

There are two ways to view this decision. On the one hand, the Fed demonstrated that a penalty other than a fine can be quite effective. While Wells remained capped, its big competitors such as JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America experienced enormous asset growth. Being shut out of the expansion certainly made an impression on the new leadership installed at Wells as a result of the scandals.

On the other hand, the track record of Wells since 2018 has not been spotless. In 2022 the CFPB imposed a $1.7 billion fine on the bank and ordered it to pay $2 billion in consumer redress for a variety of illegitimate practices both before and after the Fed enforcement action. The practices included surprise overdraft fees and improper interest charges on auto and mortgage loans.

In 2021 the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency fined Wells $250 million for unsafe practices related to material deficiencies in its loss mitigation activities.

Wells has also been penalized for misconduct in its securities and trading operations. Since 2019 it has paid over $250 million in fines and settlements to the Securities and Exchange Commission as well as $89 million to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

Regulators have punished Wells for its employment practices. The Occupational Safety and Heald Administration, which enforces the whistleblower protection provisions of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, found that the bank had improperly fired a manager who complained about illegal practices and ordered that the manager be paid $22 million in damages. The U.S. Labor Department and state regulators in California and New York have cited Wells for wage and hour violations.

Along with government enforcement actions, Wells continues to face a steady stream of class action lawsuits. In recent years it has paid out large sums in settlements, including $185 million to resolve litigation alleging it improperly put mortgages of struggling customers into forbearance without informed consent during the Covid pandemic, damaging their credit rating.

Wells Fargo may no longer be defrauding customers through the creation of bogus accounts, but it appears unable to avoid numerous other types of misconduct. It thus does not deserve relief from the Fed’s restrictions.

If any shackles are to be removed, they should be the ones unjustly being imposed on CFPB rather than those properly put on Wells Fargo.

Weaponizing Regulation

Donald Trump has long presented himself as a foe of regulation, and since taking office for the second time he has gone to great lengths to eliminate existing rules, prevent the adoption of new ones, and dismantle entire agencies.

Yet now it appears he has discovered that regulation can be put to good use—not to control corporate misconduct but rather to advance his administration’s ideological aims and to weaken his perceived enemies.

The False Claims Act (FCA) is one of the primary tools used by the Justice Department to address fraud by federal contractors and healthcare providers. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, previously one of Trump’s criminal lawyers, recently sent a memo to DOJ prosecutors saying they should bring FCA actions against contractors or other recipients of federal funds that have diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.

To promote such efforts, Blanche said he is creating a Civil Rights Fraud Initiative with teams of lawyers from the DOJ’s Fraud Division and the Civil Rights Division who would be expected to collaborate with both the U.S. Attorney Offices around the country and other federal agencies.

Blanche’s initiative is an escalation of the Trump Administration’s aggressive moves to depict DEI, which is meant to address racism and sexism, as its own form of discrimination. It is in keeping with a document issued in March by the DOJ and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission warning that DEI could be unlawful. And it goes along with the announcement by the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs that it was looking for evidence of supposedly illegal practices in the plans submitted by federal contractors under the Biden Administration to address allegations of discrimination.

The Federal Communications Commission, which has a history of addressing employment discrimination by broadcast license holders, is also targeting DEI. FCC chairman Brendan Carr, an unabashed Trump supporter, has been pressuring companies such as Disney and Comcast over their diversity practices. Verizon won approval for its purchase of Frontier Communications by promising to abandon its DEI programs.

Carr is also using the FCC’s authority over media mergers to assist Trump’s dubious lawsuits against private media companies such as CBS parent Paramount Global. And he has used the power of the agency to try to influence the way the news gets reported. He has, for example, posted tweets suggesting that outlets owned by Comcast might be putting their licenses at risk by failing to depict deportee Kilmar Abrego Garcia as the violent gang member the White House claims him to be.

Carr and Blanche appear to be in the vanguard of an emerging effort by the Trump Administration to use the justice and regulatory systems to attack its perceived enemies in the business world.

Wholesale deregulation is troubling, but just as concerning is the warping of oversight into a weapon against corporations for no legitimate policy purpose. One might expect deep-pocketed companies to use their resources to defend themselves. But for now, it appears they are more likely to join many universities, law firms, and other institutions in giving in to the intimidation.

The Other Corporate Restraints

Donald Trump thinks that young girls should get by with fewer dolls, but there is apparently no limit to the number of regulatory gifts he is offering Corporate America. Long-standing rules are being brushed aside, while laws such as the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act are not being enforced. Entire agencies such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau have been put in limbo. Investigations launched by the Biden Administration are being abandoned. Trump even pardoned a cryptocurrency company and its founders fined for anti-money-laundering deficiencies.

Big Business is not, however, escaping all oversight. That’s because there are two areas beyond Trump’s control that are still acting as checks on corporate abuses: state government regulation and private litigation.

The U.S. Justice Department may be focusing more on legitimizing Trump’s acceptance of a $400 million airplane from Qatar, but state prosecutors continue to go after misconduct in the business world. This is true even in red states. The Texas Attorney General’s office recently announced that it is collecting more than $1 billion from Google to settle allegations that the company unlawfully amassed private data on users regarding geolocation, incognito searches, and biometrics.

Hawaii’s AG negotiated a $700 million settlement with Bristol-Myers Squibb and Sanofi, resolving long-running litigation over the safety and efficacy of the blood thinner Plavix.

New Jersey’s AG and its Department of Environmental Protection announced a settlement of up to $450 million with 3M to resolve litigation over the company’s role in contamination of drinking water supplies with toxic PFAS substances, also known as forever chemicals.

Meanwhile in the courts, drug distributors McKesson, Cardinal Health, and Cencora (formerly AmerisourceBergen) together agreed to pay $300 million to a group of employee benefit plans to settle class action litigation alleging they contributed to the opioid epidemic in their marketing of the dangerous drugs.

A state jury in Louisiana recently determined that oil giant Chevron should pay $745 million in damages for harm caused to the coastline over many years of drilling activity. In the latest of a series of antitrust settlements in the meat industry, Tyson Foods and two other companies agreed to pay $64 million to settle allegations they conspired to fix prices on pork products provided to food service providers.

Defying the Trump Administration’s campaign to prohibit any efforts to address systemic racism and sexism, private anti-discrimination lawsuits move forward. Google just agreed to pay $50 million to settle allegations that it paid thousands of black workers less than their white counterparts and limited their opportunities for advancement.

A federal judge in California just granted preliminary approval to a class action settlement in which Walt Disney Company agreed to pay $43 million to resolve allegations that the compensation given to women in middle management was substantially lower than what was received by men in substantially similar jobs.

These are but a few of the steady stream of cases being brought by AGs and class action lawyers. It is far from desirable for the federal government to retreat from its primary role in business oversight. But until that policy shift can be reversed, the states and the courts are making sure that corporate misconduct does not go unchallenged.

Antitrust Uncertainty

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.