In the first few weeks of his presidency, Donald Trump signed a series of controversial executive orders that are designed to exert tight control over 19 federal agencies that were established decades ago by Congress to act independently of the president. Since then, the Trump administration has attempted to methodically remove the independence of the Federal Election Commission, National Labor Relations Board, Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and other agencies.
The latest regulatory agency in the presidential crosshairs is one of the most important: the corporate watchdog Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Just recently, the White House mounted a takeover of the FTC by firing the only two Democratic commissioners on the five-person commission and politicizing its bipartisan regulatory oversight.
While the administration efforts appear a bit haphazard and chaotic, in fact, the defenestration of these agencies is all part of a master strategy that was hatched a year ago, known as Project 2025. Project 2025 is an 800-page right-wing policy manifesto that proposed a menu of controversial policies based on questionable legal theories that these congressionally mandated agencies should, in fact, answer directly to the president as part of the executive branch of government. The White House is trying to force all boards to submit their proposed regulations to it for review and is asserting the power to block such agencies from spending funds on projects that conflict with presidential priorities.
This is an important administrative shift because the FTC—which was authorized in 1914 and currently employs more than 1,000 staff, including over 500 attorneys and 70 economists with an annual budget of $500 million—plays a crucial oversight role in the U.S. economy. It is responsible for policing corporate America and enforcing consumer protection laws.
Most recently, it has overseen regulation enforcement for big technology companies such as Trump ally Elon Musk’s Twitter/X, as well as Meta/Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and TikTok. Previously, the Biden administration had waged a historic effort to empower the FTC to reign in corporate monopolies and foster more competition in the airline, grocery, healthcare, publishing, and pharmaceutical industries. But Donald Trump appears to be looking to end all that and have the FTC do his bidding.
Firing of Democratic commissioners – illegally?
To assert control over the FTC, President Trump fired the only two Democratic members of the Federal Trade Commission. The FTC is normally headed by five commissioners who are nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate, with the president’s party holding three seats and the opposing party holding two.
There is just one problem with President Trump’s purging: commissioners of the FTC, as well as the other independent regulatory boards under attack, are protected from removal under a 1935 unanimous Supreme Court ruling that said the president may not fire them solely over policy disagreements. Nevertheless, the White House told both Democrats, Rebecca Kelly Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya, that the president was terminating them because “your continued service on the FTC is inconsistent with my administration’s priorities.”
Even more perplexing, one of the fired commissioners, Rebecca Slaughter, had been nominated by President Trump during his first term in 2018. The other fired commissioner, Bedoya, blamed their firing on “the billionaires behind the president at his inauguration.” He fears that without its independence from the president, the FTC will become too subservient to the president’s business allies and will open the door for corruption and corporate giveaways to Trump’s top donors.
President Trump also has fired commissioners at other agencies. In late January, the president fired Gwynne Wilcox, the Democratic chairperson of the National Labor Relations Board, who sued to challenge her dismissal, which resulted in a judge reinstating her in early March. Both fired FTC commissioners have sued the Trump administration for reinstatement, but the White House is defending its FTC coup by disputing the relevance of past Supreme Court decisions.
“President Trump has the lawful authority to manage personnel within the executive branch,” said a White House spokesperson. “President Trump will continue to rid the federal government of bad actors unaligned with his common sense agenda.”
But their rationale is a legal stretch. Rebecca Haw Allensworth, a professor at the Vanderbilt University Law School, said the FTC was established as an independent agency in 1914 “on the theory that consumer protection and the various goals of the FTC were better addressed through less political means.” The Trump administration’s posture, she says, “Serves to really undermine both the things the FTC can do and also its legitimacy as a bipartisan institution.”
FTC crackdown timed to protect Trump allies?
The timing of this crackdown is also suspicious. President Joe Biden’s FTC was engaged in a number of actions —many of which are still pending—in which the FTC is trying to rein in the monopoly dominance of a number of U.S. corporations, especially big tech companies who have been currying influence with President Trump. The FTC is about to go to trial against Meta/Facebook in April, possibly seeking a breakup of Meta over its past monopolistic acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp, which cemented its dominance in digital media.
Biden’s FTC also sued to block corporate mergers involving Microsoft and other companies, aggressively punished companies for privacy violations, and filed far-reaching lawsuits against Google and Amazon for their monopolistic dominance. Trump inauguration donors Elon Musk, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos are all either being sued or have court orders being enforced by the FTC.
Biden’s FTC was also suing John Deere for preventing ranchers and farmers from fixing their own tractors, forcing them to take their equipment to the dealers, and the largest provider of multifamily rental units in the country for loading their rent bills with hidden junk fees. The FTC is still in active litigation against these companies.
But these enforcement actions will likely be canceled if Trump succeeds in bringing the FTC under his thumb. Corporate executives are closely watching the outcome, while anti-trust advocates are seeing the Trump administration’s actions as tantamount to offering corporate pardons to monopoly lawbreakers who have donated hundreds of millions of dollars to Donald Trump.
Many legal experts view the FTC enfeeblement as part of a broader Trump strategy to force the Supreme Court’s hand on a key expansion of executive power and to overturn the 1935 Supreme Court decision. This strategy takes a page right out of the Project 2025 playbook, which advocates for a legal confrontation. A court case would take a few years to play out but, in the meantime, gutting the FTC would empower the biggest businesses and monopolists, many of whom are Trump’s allies. But consumers and economic competition would pay the price.
For decades, the FTC has been an independent, bipartisan business watchdog that has put consumers ahead of politics. But if the Trump administration is able to prevail in this battle, that will mean the end of independence for the FTC, as well as many other regulatory and enforcement agencies.
