March 30, 2023
For someone seemingly devoted to the creed “big is bad,” Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chair Lina Khan is wholly uncompromising when it comes to her own behemoth of a political agenda. As one result, Commissioner Christine Wilson announced her resignation from the agency this month in a public letter, denouncing Khan’s disregard for sound policy, mistreatment of staff, and allowing political goals to subvert the FTC’s primary consumer protection efforts.
Wilson, the sole Republican commissioner remaining at the “independent” agency, detailed how Khan’s “abuses of government power” rendered it impossible to continue in her role. She now joins a chorus of voices demanding a check on Khan’s reckless and officious reign over an agency once hailed as a bastion of bipartisanship.
Biden’s appointment of Khan to chair the FTC in 2021 shocked many people as an enormous overreach; Khan had no background in economics and was still a law student during the Trump administration. While an article she authored in law school on the supposed threats Amazon posed to society made her the toast of far-left antitrust activists, she lacked leadership experience to head a federal agency and failed to demonstrate any foundational knowledge of corporate operations or basic market dynamics.
Her fundamental deficiencies have become glaringly obvious throughout her short tenure and earned her scathing reviews from accomplished legal scholars and policy experts. Khan seems to have confused the pursuit of personal political capital with the FTC’s designated purpose: to protect both consumers and market competition.
Khan instead is committed to a “Neo-Brandeisian” approach to antitrust reform centered on one fundamental ethos: big is bad. Eschewing nuanced, contextual analysis on a case-by-case basis, Khan has fixated on this hyper-simplified view of the world—abandoning decades of economic and legal precedent. One tag that has stuck came from a former FTC commissioner who labeled her work “hipster antitrust.”
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