Trump 2.0 antitrust agenda takes shape in administration’s first 100 days: What we’re seeing and what to expect

Both “Big Monopoly” and “Big Government” are areas of focus for the agencies in the second Trump administration. Chair Ferguson and AAG Slater have articulated a guiding antitrust enforcement philosophy that considers the threat that Big Monopoly poses to competition, free markets, and “individual liberty” to be on par with the perceived dangers wrought by Big Government. While the latter is the more traditional target of a conservative policy agenda, Chair Ferguson said that it has been a mistake for Republicans to turn a “blind eye” to the effects of Big Monopoly. Chair Ferguson advocates for a “refreshed view of antitrust”—which he has termed “MAGA Antitrust”— whereby antitrust enforcers may appropriately intervene in order to protect the public from Big Monopoly. AAG Slater agrees with Ferguson about the equivalent dangers posed by Big Monopoly and Big Government, and endorses the idea of “new right” thinkers who have called tyranny.com and tyranny.gov “two sides of the same coin.”

In line with this commitment to targeting the perceived threats to competition posed by Big Monopoly, under the leadership of Chair Ferguson and AAG Slater, the FTC and DOJ are continuing to litigate monopolization cases brought by their respective agencies during prior administrations³ targeting some of the country’s largest tech firms. Trials for two of these cases are currently underway in D.C. federal court.

From the Big Government perspective, both the FTC and DOJ are targeting purportedly anticompetitive regulations. In late March 2025, DOJ launched an Anticompetitive Regulations Task Force “to advocate for the elimination of anticompetitive state and federal laws and regulations.”⁴ Shortly thereafter, on April 9, 2025, President Trump issued an Executive Order Reducing Anti-Competitive Regulatory Barriers.⁵ The order states that regulations “that reduce competition, entrepreneurship, and innovation . . . should be eliminated,” and instructs agency heads to consult with FTC Chair Ferguson and Attorney General Pam Bondi to complete a review of all regulations subject to their rulemaking authority that, among other things, facilitate the creation of de facto or de jure monopolies and create unnecessary barriers to entry for new market participants.⁶ In response to the Executive Order, on April 14, 2025 the FTC launched its own public inquiry into the impact of federal regulations on competition,⁷ issuing an RFI inviting members of the public— including consumers, workers, businesses, start-ups, potential market entrants, investors, and academics—to comment on how federal regulations can harm competition in the American economy.”⁸

Big Tech and dominant advertisers are also in the FTC’s and DOJ’s crosshairs under Trump. AAG Slater and Chair Ferguson have said that they intend to effectuate President Trump’s “America First” agenda by using the antitrust laws to target the perceived censorship of conservative ideas by dominant technology firms and advertisers. They argue that the “censorship epidemic” is being facilitated by large tech companies who purportedly wield their market power to “achieve political outcomes” and suppress conservative speech. Chair Ferguson said that this issue has been an “awakening” for him with respect to understanding how companies’ market power could affect ordinary Americans. On February 20, 2025, only a month into Ferguson’s tenure as FTC Chair, the FTC launched a public inquiry and issued a Request for Information (RFI) “to better understand how technology platforms deny or degrade users’ access to services based on the content of their speech or affiliations, and how this conduct may have violated the law.”⁹ Chair Ferguson said the RFI is intended to “help the FTC better understand how these firms may have violated the law by silencing and intimidating Americans for speaking their minds.”¹⁰

Both AAG Slater and Chair Ferguson argue that the consumer welfare standard extends to economic injuries beyond just price, including variables such as quality, output, innovation, and impact on workers. Expanding upon this broader view of the consumer welfare standard, Chair Ferguson has described how enforcers may use the antitrust laws to target companies allegedly engaging in the suppression of conservative viewpoints. For example, where advertisers agree with one another – or through a third party – not to advertise in certain outlets based on the content of the speech promulgated by those outlets, Chair Ferguson will consider this to be a concerted refusal to deal. Chair Ferguson pushed back against claims that such violations are not a traditional concern of antitrust, arguing that such activity is a “dangerous exercise of market power” that leads to the drying up of either ideas or access to those ideas, and is an injury to consumers and a “naked violation” of the core principle of the antitrust laws. Accordingly, he considers the FTC Act to extend to such conduct, and says that the FTC is taking this issue “very seriously.” 

The transition from the Biden administration to the second Trump administration ushered in a warmer climate for M&A at both the FTC and DOJ. But companies should not expect that the agencies will return wholesale to the more lax enforcement typical of the agencies in some prior Republican administrations. Chair Ferguson has been clear that while he does not share what he describes as the previous administration’s “pretty obvious ideological predisposition against M&A,” he does not believe that we should return to an era characterized by a preference for monopoly versus intervention because of fears of false positives. Instead, Chair Ferguson said that procompetitive M&A that allows innovation to thrive will pass through review quickly, and the agency will “move with equal alacrity to stop anticompetitive deals.” Chair Ferguson pledged that if the FTC thinks a deal is illegal or poses a real competition problem, the agency will go to court to block it. If the agency does not think a deal is illegal, they will get out of the way quickly and not hold up the transaction until it becomes unprofitable.

Both agencies are expected to resume the practice of entering into divestiture agreements to resolve antitrust concerns with a given merger. Chair Ferguson believes that continuing the previous administration’s “categorical ban” of remedies would be over-indexing to solve the problem. AAG Slater said she has a strong bias for structural remedies, but that she can identify a “BS” consent when she sees one. Thus, both AAG Slater and Chair Ferguson said that their respective agencies intend to employ a remedies program that will allow them to prevent anticompetitive merger activity without blocking an entire deal. David Shaw, Principal Deputy at the FTC Bureau of Competition, said recently that it is not the FTC’s job to “fix someone’s deal,” and that it is ”incumbent on the parties” to come forward with a proposal to remedy the agency’s anticompetitive concerns. Shaw said that the FTC will engage in good faith and consider “real remedies” proposed by the parties.¹¹

On the other hand, the FTC and DOJ leadership are not currently planning to abandon some of the other major merger changes implemented during the Biden administration. Chair Ferguson said that maintaining “stability across administrations” is part of the reason that he has elected to retain the 2023 Merger Guidelines¹², warning that the Guidelines will “become largely worthless to businesses and the courts” if the agencies keep repealing them with each new administration.¹³ However, he has also left the door open for the agencies to, where appropriate, “consider revisions as they have done in the past.”¹⁴ Chair Ferguson also has similarly expressed support for the new HSR Rule, which was finalized at the end of the Biden administration and took effect on February 10, 2025, saying that it is the product of a bipartisan consensus and “will allow us to find anticompetitive mergers efficiently, while quickly getting out of the way of deals that will benefit the American people.”¹⁵ The FTC estimated that the time and cost to complete an HSR filing may more than quadruple – and since the new rule took effect, the burden has increased significantly, especially for parties that sell overlapping products or services and for private capital firms. Ferguson has promised that, if “it becomes clear that the information that [the new HSR Rule] require[s] companies to turn over isn’t useful, or it becomes clear that the burden, the cost, isn’t justified by the benefit, Gail Slater at DOJ and I can put our heads together and come up with potential reforms.”¹⁶

Labor issues will also remain on the agencies’ antitrust enforcement agenda.

In early March 2025, the FTC announced the formation of a Joint Labor Task Force to “prioritize rooting out and prosecuting deceptive, unfair, and anticompetitive labor-market practices that harm American workers.” The Joint Labor Task Force will include representatives from the FTC’s Bureau of Competition, Bureau of Consumer Protection, Bureau of Economics and Office of Policy Planning. Chair Ferguson has said that while he does not believe that the FTC has the power to categorically proscribe every noncompete agreement in America, the FTC Joint Labor Task Force is designed to allow the FTC to focus its resources on targeting those non-competes that are anticompetitive.

This case-by-case approach explains Chair Ferguson’s previous dissent to the FTC’s proposed noncompete rule that was finalized at the end of the Biden administration. In addition to what he perceives to be constitutional problems attendant with the rule, he also considers the rule to be overbroad, since he considers some non-competes to have social utility.

Chair Ferguson has also has said that, in line with President Trump’s push to remove diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives from the government, the task force will use its resources to target “collusion or unlawful coordination on DEI metrics.”¹⁷ This could lead to FTC investigations of such purported collusion among private-sector corporations throughout the economy on the basis of an undefined metric which, to date, has not been articulated or communicated to stakeholders.

DOJ is similarly focused on identifying harmful labor market conduct. On April 4, 2025, the DOJ hosted a roundtable on labor that included legal experts and union representatives who “shared their personal stories and detailed ways that non-compete agreements, no poach agreements and other forms of unfair practices impact their livelihood.”¹⁸

President Trump’s DOJ has echoed the views of DOJ under President Biden with respect to competition concerns related to algorithmic pricing. On March 27, 2025, DOJ filed a Statement of Interest (SOI) in an algorithmic pricing case outlining how the agency views competitors’ joint use of a common pricing algorithm.¹⁹ In the SOI, DOJ made two key points. First, DOJ may consider such use of an algorithmic pricing tool to set starting-point or maximum prices to be concerted action under Section 1 of the Sherman Act. And second, DOJ may consider the exchange of information through a common pricing algorithm to violate Section 1. The SOI describes competitors’ use of algorithmic technologies “to coordinate their decision-making” as a “growing threat to the free market competition on which our economic system is premised”, and says that DOJ “remains committed to enforcing the antitrust laws against unlawful exchanges of competitively sensitive information that take place through and alongside new technologies.”²⁰

On April 12, 2025, DOJ Principal Assistant Attorney General Roger Alford confirmed that the agency considers “algorithmic collusion” to be a “cause of great concern” for the government.²¹ Alford warned of “autonomous” cartel-like pricing behavior being facilitated by algorithmic pricing tools across markets, and noted that it is difficult for the agency to decide which cases to prioritize. Alford’s statements indicate that DOJ under President Trump, like its predecessor, may consider price fixing using algorithms to be a per se violation of the antitrust laws.

It remains to be seen how the antitrust agencies will approach competition issues related to artificial intelligence more broadly. As we recently discussed, we anticipate somewhat reduced antitrust scrutiny of AI firms’ practices and acquisitions, but certainly not a hands-off approach from the agencies. Indeed, although the Trump Administration is signaling deregulation to foster AI innovation,²² regulators remain concerned about perceived concentration of AI technology and inputs to its development. And AI may raise particular concerns for the agencies when the technology is perceived to exacerbate the alleged ideological bias among certain tech firms and facilitate the censorship of conservative viewpoints.