Hill was policy director for the Center for Humane Technology, co-founder of FairVote and political reform director at New America. You can reach him on X @StevenHill1776.
This is part of a series offering a nonpartisan counter to Project 2025, a conservative guideline to reforming government and policymaking during the first 180 days of a second Trump administration. The Fulcrum's cross partisan analysis of Project 2025 relies on unbiased critical thinking, reexamines outdated assumptions, and uses reason, scientific evidence, and data in analyzing and critiquing Project 2025.
Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s manifesto designed to guide a new Trump administration, has proposed dramatic changes to the administrative state and specific federal agencies to advance a far-right populist agenda. However, its plan for revamping the Federal Trade Commission — which has been leading the Biden administration’s successful anti-monopoly campaign — is much less about attacking the government's role than other chapters.
In fact, the narrative for the FTC refreshingly discusses the emerging philosophical split within the conservative movement over the best approach to the agency’s anti-monopoly work.
Consequently, in key ways, this section of Project 2025 sometimes sounds more progressive on corporate monopoly power than some of the wealthiest backers of the Democratic presidential nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris. This reflects the influence of conservative economic populists like the GOP vice presidential nominee, Sen. J.D. Vance, and Oren Cass, founder and chief economist of the maverick conservative organization American Compass.
For Democrats, this could emerge as a dangerous third rail in the election, with the Trump-Vance ticket attempting to outflank Harris-Walz on the left on certain economic issues and on the right on cultural and immigration issues.
Even though it was authorized in 1914, the FTC is not widely known to everyday Americans. But under the Biden administration it has embarked on a historic effort to reign in corporate monopolies. It employs more than 1,000 staff, including over 500 attorneys and 70 economists, with an annual budget of about $500 million. It led by five commissioners who are nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate, and no more than three can be of the same party. Along with the Federal Communications Commission, it oversees regulation enforcement for big technology companies such as Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft, TikTok and Twitter/X, as well as monopolistic practices in the airline, grocery, health care, publishing and other industries.
Pop quiz. Who said, “Beyond antitrust injury, we are witnessing in today’s markets the use of economic power — often market and perhaps even monopoly power — to undermine democratic institutions and civil society.” Was it Lina Khan, the chair of the Federal Trade Commission? Or is that a line from the Project 2025 report?
You’d be forgiven if you didn’t know that it is in fact a line from Project 2025. Specifically it is from the part of the report in which a new breed of economic conservative philosophy is struggling against the old guard in considering the FTC’s role overseeing antitrust regulation. While most of the conservative movement still insists on a Robert Bork0 and Milton Friedman-style libertarian focus (using consumer welfare, low prices, maximum competition and small government to attain economic efficiency and productivity), Project 2025 cracks open the door to a different approach for conservatives.
The newer conservatism, in part driven by an emerging core of younger Republican leaders, has taken a broader view of antitrust that is more willing to look at the possible negative impacts of business concentration and raw corporate might on economic competition, innovation and political democracy. The Project 2025 report quotes approvingly from Republican Sen. John Sherman, of Sherman Antitrust Act fame, who said in the late 19th century, “If we will not endure a king as a political power, we should not endure a king over the production, transportation, and sale of any of the necessaries of life. If we would not submit to an emperor, we should not submit to an autocrat of trade, with power to prevent competition and to fix the price of any commodity.”
Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren couldn’t have said it better. However, in applying this new conservative standard, the proposed measures in Project 2025 lack ambition and come up measurably short.
With a federal judge recently declaring Google a “monopolist” in a landmark antitrust ruling, and with pending cases against Meta/Facebook, Amazon and Apple, nowhere in Project 2025 is there a call for rigorous anti-monopoly enforcement. There is nothing so bold as a proposal to restrict or closely scrutinize mergers and acquisitions, much less to break up monopolist tech companies that have gobbled up competitor after competitor. Instead, Project 2025 uses contorted thinking to play the hit conservative tune “Blame Government.”
“Concentration of economic power facilitates collusion between government and private actors, undermining the rule of law,” it reads, without presenting any real evidence.
Instead, Project 2025 moves on to safer “apple pie” ground — a call to protect children online. The manifesto takes the defensible position that excessive social media use is strongly linked to mental health issues among individuals, especially teens, including depression, self-harm and suicide attempts. The Big Tech platforms have profited from using private information from teens without parents’ knowledge or consent, and using that info to create sensationalized content to keep teenagers scrolling under peer pressure.
Project 2025’s policy response is to call on the FTC to examine platforms’ advertising and contract-making with teens as a deceptive or unfair trade practice. It then calls on the FTC to “institute unfair trade practice proceedings against entities that enter into contracts with children without parental consent” as a way of respecting parental authority. Those are reasonable proposals that deserve consideration.
But the philosophical tension between economic populist conservatives and free-trade libertarian conservatives never resolves itself, and so Project 2025’s chapter comes across as thematically erratic and incoherent. In order to sidestep this controversy, the manifesto sings another conservative hit tune, namely criticizing the FTC as too centralized and too much “big government.” Instead, it argues for empowering state attorneys general, claiming they are far more responsive to their local constituents than the FTC. It recommends greater cooperation between Washington, D.C., and state AGs over enforcement in key sectors such as Big Tech, hospital mergers and supermarket mergers.
Much of that approach makes sense, but ironically it mimics what the Biden administration’s FTC has already been doing. The FTC has joined with 17 states to sue Amazon as a monopoly that is squeezing sellers on its vast marketplace and favoring its own services, resulting in artificially higher prices and harming consumers. The FTC has also joined 40 states in accusing Facebook of buying both Instagram and WhatsApp more than a decade ago to illegally squash competition. Project 2025 complains unconvincingly that the reach and influence of the FTC’s regional offices has shrunk dramatically, and that the FTC’s mothership should consider returning authority to these offices.
Most importantly, the Project 2025 chapter on the Federal Trade Commission pulls back the curtain on this interesting philosophical tension within conservatism about the right approach to giant corporations and outsized economic power. The manifesto reflects this internal confusion when it says, “The policy implications of this quandary are not clear, but for the conservative movement, some believe that some type of policy response is necessary.” This tension is also evident in Project 2025’s chapter on the Federal Communications Commission.
Without a more coherent philosophical grounding, it’s hard to predict how these differences would play out in a second Trump administration, especially given Donald Trump’s propensity to formulate policy based on personal beliefs rather than generally accepted conservative values and principles.
More articles about Project 2025
- A cross-partisan approach
- An Introduction
- Rumors of Project 2025’s Demise are Greatly Exaggerated
- Department of Education
- Managing the bureaucracy
- Department of Defense
- Department of Energy
- The Environmental Protection Agency
- Education Savings Accounts
- Department of Veterans Affairs
- The Department of Homeland Security
- U.S. Agency for International Development
- Affirmative action
- A federal Parents' Bill of Rights
- Department of Labor
- Intelligence community
- Department of State
- Department of the Interior
- Federal Communications Commission
- A perspective from Europe
- Department of Health and Human Services
- Voting Rights Act
- Another look at the Federal Communications Commission
Children watch a July Fourth Parade along the Walkway of Heroes and Independence Avenue on July 04, 2026 in Tappan, New York.
The Great American Grumpfest
Our nation’s 250th birthday party didn’t feel especially patriotic and wasn’t as much fun as the 200th anniversary was.
President Trump, who did his best to co-opt our holiday for his personal aggrandizement, was a major reason. The party he threw in Washington, D.C., was crankier than uplifting, and less about celebrating our shared past and a promising future than about reminding us how far we have strayed from our founders’ plan to create a republic that future Americans would keep in good working order.
Credit Trump this much. He has a singular gift for picking at scabs that other politicians would rather ignore and pushing us into reckonings we don’t need.
The thing is, Americans have seen all this before. Sometimes the makeover we were encouraged to undertake was more conservative, sometimes more liberal. Whatever direction we were pushing, however, the reckoning we had in mind this time had to be more forthright and the conclusion more definitive than it was the last time.
Our current discontents, the ones behind the reckoning President Trump has been trying to inspire, are not trivial. Included among them are immigration, birthright citizenship, exploding healthcare costs, election rigging, a gag-inducing national debt, how we educate our children, too many genders, racial differences we can’t move past, a lopsided economy that favors more well-off Americans, and historic levels of political corruption and graft. Add to these the several foreign adventures he has pushed us into or is anxious to undertake, and you have the makings of a national headache the likes of which we haven’t had in half a century.
All the elbow-throwing and overheated rhetoric we’re using today have begun to look almost normal in all the ways that bickering neighbors and feuding family members appear normal. But they have also made us look mean-spirited and have portrayed our differences as irreconcilable. To ourselves, of course, but also to many people outside the United States who might be forgiven for turning their heads and not looking at the national car wreck we Americans show no interest in avoiding.
The good news, as I suggested above, is that Americans have had a great deal of practice dealing with challenges and national car wrecks like these.
This essay begins to lay out the reasons why.
By way of illustration, we have our seemingly insatiable demand for more bad news about race in America.
Sixty years after being released from the legal constrictions that bedeviled both white and black Americans, many white people have come to believe the color that used to make them unassailable is now a sign of a moral inferiority born of a racial animus they can never wash off. Many black people, on the other hand, are insisting that America is as hopelessly stacked against them as the formerly unassailable white people’s ancestors used to tell their black ones.
The result is that many people today are buying into racist nightmares and mumbo jumbo that their black and white ancestors worked hard and effectively to put in each other’s heads.
This might be dismissed as crazy behavior if it weren’t so important to rituals Americans have long used to express their deepest fears about each other while figuring out what move they can make that won’t end with their world crashing down on everybody’s head.
Unfortunately, the kind of cultural sleight of hand we have used to ramp up our racial differences has been appropriated by people who have many other cultural fears and unresolved differences with each other. Their clumsy but culturally prescribed missteps are making all these other issues look as irremediable as our racial problems.
A good place to start an answer to how we back away from ledges is Alexis de Tocqueville’s writing on early-19th-century American democracy. He had an optimistic take on Americans’ unscripted displays of public bravado, recrimination, and payback.
For him, these were occasions when people tried to mitigate the effects of the unfair hand they were dealing someone else or had themselves been dealt by behaving in ways quite at odds with how they would otherwise be expected to act. These inversions of what Tocqueville called “the natural order of conscience” presented themselves as a loud but culturally muted challenge to the hypocrisies that people had built into the world they’d made together.
One of his favorite illustrations of early-American hypocrisy involved slave masters sleeping with their less-than-worthy slaves. To the best of my knowledge, he didn’t pick up on all the ways that slaves messed with their owners. Their well-chronicled and quiet resistance showed that even severely ill-treated people can exercise more control over their lives than outsiders appreciate.
Be that as it may, such inversions of a people’s “natural order of conscience” make a good public show of them wrestling with demons they can’t or may not want to shake off, but in any case, are nowhere close to figuring out how to cast out.
Implicit in these disruptions was the discomforting idea that people might flip the entire script and turn the world on its head in more permanent ways. That kind of flipping worked out better for us in our revolution against England than in our Civil War. These events taught us the value of stepping back from historically unprecedented ledges.
Americans of late have been giving loud expression to a long list of things they don’t like about each other and the last makeover they started but didn’t finish a half-century ago. The outcome of our fights today will be as revealing as they are embarrassing to everyone who imagined they could recast our country in a way that privileged their favorite kind of Americans.
Their disappointment with the accommodations they strike will be palpable, but the middling results they achieve with all their pushing and shoving won’t be anything they can’t live with.
Anthropologists who have written about such moments in other cultures less “advanced” than our own show that people find ways to work around their seemingly irreconcilable differences without ever fully resolving them. Indeed, the patches and repairs people make have the unheralded effect of reinforcing rather than undermining the legitimacy of the practices and values they thought were fundamentally flawed.
For example…
White guilt and black pessimism do more good than putting cash into the pockets of professional shamers and handwringers. They give the rest of us who don’t feel guilty or powerless more time to make the world less racially unequal. Good news.
Regarding illegal immigration, the entrance requirements for future immigrants will remain stringent. Americans will applaud the continued detention and deportation of the few illegal immigrants who commit serious crimes. Good news.
All the people who came to the United States without being legally vetted and were locked up for a time will be released in numbers small enough to avoid serious media attention. Along with the several million other good people who snuck in but avoided capture, the former detainees will go to school, find gainful employment, pay their taxes, and stay out of trouble. Many will eventually become citizens. Good news.
Investigations into election tampering and Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential loss will come to an unceremonious conclusion the day after his second term ends. Many Americans will grumble about this, but there will also be some quiet partying, too. Good and bad news.
Congressional hearings into all the grifting accomplished by people tied to the Trump administration will end without anyone having to pay a dime back to the American taxpayers. Bad news, we’ll learn to live with.
New laws and regulations will be created in the hope that the kind of corruption practiced by President Trump will not be repeated for another 250 years. Good news, I hope we’ll live long enough to enjoy.
Show trials for people who allegedly vandalized the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, if they happen, will get big television viewer ratings. Good news.
Trials for pardoned Capitol insurrectionists who committed serious crimes after their release should get more attention, but won’t. Bad news.
We will continue to hear nothing from most of the people who were pardoned for crimes they committed in the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. They will keep their mouths shut and their heads down for the rest of their life. Good news.
The gold-gilded ornaments that Donald Trump had plastered all over the White House will be shipped to Mar-a-Lago, where the former president will sell them on eBay. Fun news.
American taxpayers end up paying for most of the new East Wing, the removal of the miniature gladiatorial arena that was built behind the White House, and the restoration of the White House rose garden. Bad news.
The Triumphal Arch was never built. Good news.
Trad wives and gay couples raise perfectly lovely children. Good but unsurprising news.
Trans men and women learn that most Americans can’t figure out who they used to be. No one gives a second thought to their use of “family bathrooms” or “unisex bathrooms” in public settings, businesses, and schools. Communities will sponsor athletic teams that have trans boys and girls just to show they can. Good news.
Budget deficits will be kicked down the road for someone else’s children to pay down. Bad news.
Federal agencies that had their budgets and employee ranks slashed during President Trump’s second term are getting some of the money and lost positions back. Good news.
Elite universities will buy their way out of DEI purgatory by competing for conservative scholars whose inflated salaries dwarf those of their liberal colleagues, who will think about suing their institutions for reverse discrimination but won’t be able to figure out who would pay for it or care. More fun news.
Okay. I’ve probably missed some ways that Americans will step back from the ledges they have been making noises about leaping off. But to the extent that my predictions pan out, the best and most important moral of the stories about us stepping away is this: everything we lost and took back, or had returned to us, will have happened without our government collapsing, civic traditions crumbling, or our people beating each other up.
The reason why is that the differences Americans have with each other really weren’t as irreconcilable as we made them out to be. The empty-sounding bromide that Americans have more that unites us than divides us turns out to be true, not just metaphorically but in fact.
Now that is really something to celebrate.
Daniel J. Monti (danieljmonti.com) is Professor of Sociology at Saint Louis University and the author of American Democracy and Disconsent: Liberalism and Illiberalism in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, and the Capitol Insurrection.