Trump's New Pick for the FTC Will Likely MAGA-fy the Agency

[Celerity]

Federal Trade Commissioner Andrew Ferguson has deep ties to the conservative judicial movement but not an easy-to-define ideology on antitrust.

https://www.notus.org/trump-transition/andrew-ferguson-ftc-trump



Donald Trump’s new pick for Federal Trade Commission chair, current Republican Commissioner Andrew Ferguson, is an ideological wild card. His stated ideas don’t fall cleanly into the anti-consolidated-corporate-power-on-principle camp, nor does he represent a hard reversion to the more hands-off approach of the FTC of the Reagan era. Some of his proposals are more accurately described as simply Trumpian — more malleable than traditional right, left, free market or populist. What is clear is that he’s a Trump loyalist with strong ties to the conservative judicial movement.

FTC watchers say Ferguson’s views are likely also tied to his ambitions. One source in the antitrust world described Ferguson to NOTUS as a driven attorney eyeing higher judicial positions in the future, without a clearly settled ideology on corporate power. “I don’t think that he has a particular set of views that will trump political considerations about his position in the party,” the source said. “If it is politically painful for Donald Trump to be opposed to Big Tech mergers and behavior, then he may find himself easing up on tech.” (Ferguson’s office did not respond to a NOTUS request for comment.)

In his nine months at the FTC thus far, Ferguson has been openly critical of current Chair Lina Khan’s aggressive enforcement strategy. His frequent, dissenting opinions signal a likely shift away from her crackdown on corporate mergers. But Ferguson has also loudly proclaimed his plans to go after Big Tech and use anti-monopoly laws to fight what he sees as censorship of conservative speech on social media. “If we’ve got agreement among the platforms to suppress ideas or speech, we have to investigate those for potential antitrust violations,” Ferguson told Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast. He later added that he wants to help Trump eliminate the “deep state.”

His pitch for the job appeared tailor-made to fit Trump’s agenda. A document laying out his policy priorities, first reported by Punchbowl News, includes plans to “fight back against the trans agenda” and “investigate and prosecute collusion on DEI” as FTC chair. (His Democratic colleagues criticized the list of priorities after his selection as chair. He responded on X that he is “dedicated to protecting all Americans from monopolists, from fraudsters, and from illegal online censorship.”) Ferguson’s first move from private practice into politics was clerking for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. This summer, he told the conservative legal group the Federalist Society he emerged from that clerkship with the conclusion that the two things in politics he cared about most were ending abortion and protecting gun rights. He later went on to work for the Senate Judiciary Committee for Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing.

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