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FTC commissioners fired as federal agencies face reckoning
The FTC, IRS and other federal agencies providing business oversight face policy shifts and restructuring measures under President Donald Trump's administration.
Federal agencies including the Federal Trade Commission, Internal Revenue Service and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau are all confronting significant changes as President Donald Trump advances campaign goals of reshaping the federal bureaucracy.
Trump on March 18 fired Democratic FTC Commissioners Alvaro Bedoya and Rebecca Slaughter. The commission is composed of five presidentially nominated and Senate-confirmed commissioners to serve seven years.
No more than three commissioners can be of the same political party, according to FTC rules. FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson and FTC Commissioner Melissa Holyoak, both Republicans, remain on the commission. Mark Meador, a Republican who Trump has nominated to the FTC, awaits Congressional confirmation.
After taking office in January, Trump took multiple steps to reduce federal agencies' authority. He issued an executive order freezing agencies from issuing new regulations, followed by another order stipulating that federal employees in policy-influencing positions hold power delegated by the president and "must be accountable to the president." The order contained language asserting that cases of career federal employees resisting and undermining executive leadership have been numerous in recent years.
Trump also established the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), led by Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk. DOGE has been closely involved in efforts to assess federal agencies and make cuts, detailing its efforts to eliminate government spending on X, formerly Twitter.
As the Trump administration moves ahead with broad agency changes, it creates uncertainty for the business community, said Bill Baer, visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution and former antitrust enforcer at the FTC and Dept. of Justice (DOJ).
"I suppose some in the business community will think it's an opportunity to do things they would not have tried to do before," Baer said. "We just don't know enough to know whether there's going to be dramatic change or very modest shifts in what the priorities are and what the challenges will look like."
FTC future uncertain
On X, former FTC Commissioner Bedoya decried being "illegally fired." He said he fought for small-town grocers, pharmacists, and worker benefits during his time at the FTC. He said he also pushed back against tech companies that "think they can track you and your kids every hour of every day so they can pocket their next billion."
Firing the two FTC commissioners strays from the agency's 110-year tradition of being a bipartisan, independent federal agency that offers a complementary approach to the DOJ, said George Hay, an antitrust law professor at Cornell Law School. Congress envisioned the FTC operating independently of the executive branch, Hay said.
"It's a very valuable counterpart to the DOJ," Hay said. "That's the more serious long-term effect."
Indeed, Brookings' Baer said bipartisan debate on antitrust enforcement, competition policies and consumer protection was a significant value-add in the FTC. He also said it doesn’t necessarily indicate the Trump administration will back off antitrust enforcement. Both FTC Chair Ferguson and Gail Slater, assistant attorney general in the DOJ's antitrust division, have stated they will continue to be assertive in antitrust enforcement., he noted.
The FTC has drawn backlash from the business community for its internal adjudicative process, which differs from the DOJ's public court proceedings. Rick Smith, CEO of public safety technology vendor Axon Enterprise, testified before a Congressional committee earlier this year about harm allegedly caused to his business by an FTC investigation in 2018.
Still, Hay said that when making such significant changes to the FTC, "this is not the way to do it." The White House is waging a broader campaign to seize control over the membership and actions of federal regulatory agencies, said William Kovacic, director of the Competition Law Center at George Washington University and a former FTC chairman.
Kovacic said the Trump administration has prioritized asserting that there is "no such thing as independent for a regulatory agency."
"This is not so much a fight about the FTC as it is about the broader framework of economic regulation at the federal level," he said.
Agencies navigate policy shifts, cuts and changes
The FTC isn't the only federal agency facing changes and policy shifts under the Trump administration.
The IRS is reportedly planning mass layoffs. The National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU), which represents employees in more than 37 federal agencies, said this would be "ill-advised" and a violation of federal law under contractual arrangements between NTEU and the IRS.
Meanwhile, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) this month dropped seven enforcement cases against several banks and payment services, including Zelle, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo, brought under the previous Biden administration. When the CFPB filed the lawsuit against Zelle in December, the company claimed in its response that the CFPB's lawsuit was legally flawed and appeared to be politically motivated.
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA), which coordinates national cybersecurity resilience, also sustained staffing cuts but reversed course due to a recent court order.
Though some judges have challenged Trump's changes to federal agencies and staffing, including CISA staffing, the administration's rapid and overwhelming pace of change makes it difficult for anyone opposing the changes, Kovacic said.
"The idea is you bewilder your opponent by the speed of operations," he said. "When you increase pace and speed and maneuver very quickly, your adversary has a hard time figuring out what's going on. By the time they react, you've moved another ten steps."
Makenzie Holland is a senior news writer covering big tech and federal regulation. Prior to joining Informa TechTarget, she was a general assignment reporter for the Wilmington StarNews and a crime and education reporter at the Wabash Plain Dealer.
