Independent Agencies

This past spring gave us a slow rate of nominations from the White House and a similarly glacial pace of confirmations from a Senate that has been plagued with an utterly dysfunctional confirmations system.

It turns out that radical ideology IS allowed at the FTC.

Mick Mulvaney and Eric Blankenstein want to permanently cripple their former agency.

The crackpot former Trump lawyer, who is facing disbarment for trying to overturn the 2020 election, wants to help Big Business rip you off.

It turns out that the ethics official who recommended that Khan recuse herself from a case involving Meta is an owner of Meta stock. This ethics judgment was music to the ears of the media organizations, Republicans, and antitrust hacks who have been attacking Lina Khan throughout her leadership. Beyond being wrong and selective in singling out FTC officials for ethics concerns, the problem with Pankey’s opinion is deeply ironic. Pankey herself has a legitimate conflict of interest in relation to Meta. 

By focusing on the (inflated) total defrauded, reporters are using big-sounding numbers without any context to try to scare the public.

Implicit in the worldview of these revolvers is the idea that corporations should be free to operate and acquire competitors with near impunity, therefore antitrust enforcement should be as narrowly tailored as possible. This is obviously problematic — we need regulators that believe in the government’s ability to take on corporations with outsized market influence — but Cravath, Swaine & Moore’s Christine Varney recently took things many steps further in her representation of the biotech company Illumina in its case against the FTC. Varney doesn’t just attack specific enforcement actions as unwarranted, but calls into question the constitutionality of the FTC’s authority to issue enforcement actions in the first place. 

Does former corporate lobbyist Anna Gomez stand for Big Telecom or a free and open internet?

Spending cuts aren’t minor, caps ignore inflation, and President Biden isn’t helpless.

Just weeks after a series of high profile train derailments headlined by the disaster in East Palestine, Ohio, the Surface Transportation Board (STB) decided to double down on the current railroad oligopoly. The STB approved a merger between Canadian Pacific Railway and Kansas City Southern Railway Company, cutting the number of major “Class I” rail companies in the United States from seven down to six. This decision is diametrically opposed to the public interest and seriously undermines trust in rail regulators.

“GOP leaders have sent a wildly exploitative ransom note to the public. The administration should not accept its terms.”

Biden’s best regulator takes aim at one of the biggest barriers to accessing rental housing.

Rolling back Trump’s framework just means that FSOC is allowing itself to see the financial system through a realistic lens.