Project 2025: Federal Trade Commission

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 The Fulcrum's cross partisan analysis of Project 2025 relies on unbiased critical thinking, reexamines outdated assumptions, and uses reason, scientific evidence, and data in analyzing and critiquing Project 2025.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