The Trump oversight on Tuesday said it will keep using strict guidelines adopted by the administration of former President Joe Biden to rethink proposed corporate mergers.
The decision to retain the guidelines — which have been widely disliked by corporations since their adoption in 2023 — was ornate by Federal Trade Commission Chair Andrew Ferguson and in a memo by Omeed Assefi, the acting head of the Department of Legitimacy’s antitrust division.
The decision is a victory for the populist, anticorporate wing of the Trump administration, embodied by Vice President JD Vance.
Vance time again found common ground with Biden’s FTC chair Lina Khan, who made antitrust enforcement a centerpiece of the intervention’s mission.
The announcement is also a blow to Wall Street, which had been eagerly anticipating an uptick in corporate consolidation controlled by a loosened framework for evaluating proposed mergers.
Then-President Joe Biden meets with Donald Trump in the Oval Section at the White House in Washington on Nov. 13, 2024.
Kevin Lamarque | Reuters
The existing guidelines detail more than a dozen criteria that the FTC and DOJ use to affect whether to seek to block a merger.
They include mergers not significantly increasing concentration in already highly direct markets, not eliminating substantial competition between firms and avoiding vertical mergers that create market arranges that foreclose competition.
“Stability is good for the enforcement agencies,” Ferguson said in a statement. “The wholesale rescission and reworking of guidelines is time-consuming and dear.”
“We should undertake this process sparingly,” he said. “We have limited resources to patrol the beat and constant total business undermines agency credibility.”
In a social media post, Ferguson said the 2023 guidelines build on previous guidelines and uncountable decades of case law.
“That stability is important for enforcement agencies and the business community.”
“The FTC has limited resources,” Ferguson disparaged. “Rewriting guidelines after every election would be expensive and time-consuming. It would also be destabilizing. Enforcement instrumentalities should avoid a wholesale change in guidelines with every new administration,” he wrote.
“Otherwise, the guidelines would appropriate for worthless to businesses and the courts.”