Open Season on Markets: How Trump's FTC Surrender Is Handing Corporate America a Blank Check to Consolidate

The Antitrust Window Closes

For roughly three years, something unusual happened inside the Federal Trade Commission. Under Chair Lina Khan, the agency actually fought back. It challenged mergers that previous administrations would have waved through with a phone call and a handshake. It sued Meta over its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp. It blocked Kroger's $25 billion bid to swallow Albertsons. It signaled, credibly and for the first time in decades, that concentrated market power was a problem the federal government intended to take seriously.

That era is now over.

With the Trump administration installing Andrew Ferguson as FTC chair in early 2025 and the broader deregulatory apparatus of the new administration taking shape, the agency has pivoted sharply toward what critics describe as a return to the permissive merger review culture of the 2010s — an era when consolidation proceeded largely unchecked and the consequences for working people were profound, lasting, and almost entirely predictable.

What Biden Built — and What He Didn't

To understand what has been lost, it is worth being precise about what the Biden antitrust moment actually was. Khan's FTC, alongside Jonathan Kanter's Department of Justice Antitrust Division, represented the most aggressive federal posture on corporate consolidation since the Reagan era reversed the New Deal consensus in the 1980s. The agencies updated merger guidelines for the first time in over a decade, explicitly recognizing that concentration harms workers — not just consumers — and brought high-profile cases against some of the most powerful corporations in the world.

But the legislative follow-through was anemic. The American Innovation and Choice Online Act, which would have imposed structural limits on dominant tech platforms, stalled in the Senate despite bipartisan support in the House. No significant antitrust reform legislation reached President Biden's desk. The enforcement push was real, but it was also entirely dependent on the occupant of the White House and the leadership of two regulatory agencies — a fragile foundation for structural economic reform.

When those agencies change hands, the policy changes with them. That is exactly what is happening now.

The Merger Math That Workers Live Inside

The stakes of this reversal are not abstract. The connection between market concentration and worker wages is one of the most robustly documented findings in contemporary labor economics. When employers consolidate within a regional labor market — when the two largest hospital systems in a mid-sized city merge, or when the dominant grocery chains reduce from three to two — workers lose bargaining power before a single union card is signed. Economists refer to this as monopsony: the labor-market mirror image of monopoly, where concentrated buyers of labor suppress wages the same way concentrated sellers suppress competition.

Research published by economists at the Roosevelt Institute and the Economic Policy Institute has consistently found that labor market concentration is associated with wage penalties of between 15 and 25 percent for affected workers. A 2020 paper in the Quarterly Journal of Economics found that a ten percent increase in employer concentration reduced wages by approximately two percent — a seemingly modest figure that compounds across millions of workers and decades of consolidation.

For small business owners, the picture is equally grim. When dominant platforms, distributors, or retailers consolidate, their leverage over suppliers increases. The independent pharmacist competing against a CVS-Aetna vertical integration, the regional grocer negotiating shelf space against a post-merger Kroger-Albertsons combine, the small manufacturer dependent on a consolidated logistics network — each faces a market environment structurally tilted against them by decisions made in Washington conference rooms.

The Strongest Case for the Other Side

The most serious argument for a lighter merger review regime is not that consolidation is costless — it is that regulatory overreach carries its own costs. Sophisticated critics of the Khan-era FTC argue, with some evidence, that aggressive pre-merger challenges create legal uncertainty that chills legitimate investment and that the agencies overreached in several high-profile cases they ultimately lost in court, including the Meta litigation and the attempted block of Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard.

This is a real critique, not a talking point. Courts did push back on some Biden-era merger challenges, and a credible antitrust enforcement regime must be able to win cases, not merely file them. The question is not whether enforcement should be surgical — it should be — but whether the appropriate response to a handful of courtroom defeats is to abandon the field entirely. The Trump administration's answer appears to be yes. That is not a calibration. It is a surrender.

Who Absorbs the Cost

The human geography of this policy shift is not evenly distributed. Workers in highly concentrated industries — healthcare, grocery, telecommunications, meatpacking, airlines — are disproportionately low-wage, disproportionately women and people of color, and disproportionately located in regions with limited alternative employment. When the FTC declines to challenge a hospital merger in rural Tennessee or a grocery consolidation in the Midwest, the workers and consumers in those markets have nowhere else to go.

Consumer prices in concentrated markets are measurably higher. A 2023 Federal Reserve analysis linked grocery sector consolidation to sustained price elevation following the pandemic, finding that firms with greater market power were better positioned to maintain elevated margins even as input costs fell. The grocery inflation that hollowed out household budgets over the past three years was not solely a supply-chain story. It was also a market power story — and the policy response is now moving in the wrong direction.

What This Signals for the Left

The collapse of the Biden antitrust moment carries a lesson that progressives would be foolish to ignore. Regulatory enforcement, however vigorous, is not a substitute for structural legislative change. Khan and Kanter were consequential — genuinely so — but they were also vulnerable. The next Democratic administration will inherit a merger landscape shaped by four or more years of permissive review, a court system reshaped by conservative judicial appointments, and a corporate sector that will have spent years taking advantage of the open window.

Building durable antitrust infrastructure means passing laws, not just appointing bold regulators. It means codifying updated merger standards, funding enforcement agencies at levels commensurate with the complexity of modern corporate structures, and creating private rights of action that allow workers and small businesses to challenge anticompetitive conduct without waiting for a presidential administration willing to act.

The window was open. It is now closed. The question is whether Democrats learned enough from the brief moment they had it to build something that cannot be dismantled by a single election.

A government that surrenders its power to check corporate consolidation has not reduced its footprint — it has simply decided whose side it is on.