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Big Business Rejoices as Trump Scraps Biden Order Combating 'Excessive Concentration of Industry'
One critic called the president's move a "signal to monopolists that they have a clear path."
Aug 15, 2025
US President Donald Trump continued taking a hatchet to his predecessor's antitrust legacy this week by rolling back an executive order that affirmed the federal government's responsibility to "enforce the antitrust laws to combat the excessive concentration of industry, the abuses of market power, and the harmful effects of monopoly and monopsony."
Trump's revocation of former President Joe Biden's 2021 order drew enthusiastic applause from the largest corporate lobbying organization in the United States.
Sean Heather, the US Chamber of Commerce's senior vice president for antitrust, declared that by repealing the Biden order—which was titled "Executive Order on Promoting Competition in the American Economy"—Trump "has rightfully chosen vigorous competition that entrusts American consumers to pick winners and losers in the marketplace, not more government bureaucracy."
One anti-monopoly advocate, Matt Stoller of the American Economic Liberties Project, mockingly congratulated Trump for "securing the approval of the US Chamber of Commerce in repealing Biden's executive order saying competition is good."
The American Prospect's David Dayen called the president's move a "signal to monopolists that they have a clear path."
The president's decision was also welcomed by officials within the Trump administration who are tasked with enforcing the nation's antitrust laws, including Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chair Andrew Ferguson and the head of the Justice Department's Antitrust Division, Gail Slater.
Ferguson claimed in a statement Thursday that the Biden order reflected the previous administration's "undue hostility toward mergers and acquisitions"—an assertion that Open Markets Institute legal director Sandeep Vaheesan refuted in a social media post, citing recent trends in merger enforcement actions.
Andrew Ferguson's claims re Biden admin are disconnected from the truth
- "Top-down competition regulations" were agencies reviving dormant statutory powers granted by Congress
- "Undue hostility toward M&A" is just not reflected in numbers on mergers and enforcement activity https://t.co/eHFyBm9tVk pic.twitter.com/PvCcsmvV8q
— Sandeep Vaheesan (@sandeepvaheesan) August 14, 2025
Biden administration antitrust officials—principally former FTC Chair Lina Khan and former DOJ Antitrust Division head Jonathan Kanter—drew praise across the political spectrum for combating corporate abuses and unlawful consolidation.
But during the first six months of his second term, Trump and his handpicked agency heads have settled or dropped key merger challenges brought by the Biden administration, ceding repeatedly to well-connected corporate lobbyists and allowing giant companies such as UnitedHealth to continue absorbing their competitors.
According to a newly updated tally by the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, Trump administration agencies have thus far dropped enforcement actions against at least 165 companies.
"Pro-monopoly and pro-concentration of corporate power and control. Those are the policies the Trump admin has espoused in firing fair competition enforcers and revoking an executive order to revitalize fair competition across markets," the Open Markets Institute said Thursday. "And prices are still sky high. No surprise."
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Trump FTC Lets Corporate Lobbyists Kill 'Massively Popular' Click-to-Cancel Rule in Court
Republicans on the Federal Trade Commission have "ensured that hardworking people will keep getting stuck with subscriptions they don't want or can't afford," said one consumer advocate.
Jul 09, 2025
Consumer advocates said Tuesday that the Trump administration is to blame for an appeals court decision that effectively killed the Federal Trade Commission's click-to-cancel rule, a Biden-era effort to stop companies from trapping consumers in subscriptions with onerous cancellation terms.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit vacated the rule entirely on procedural grounds on Tuesday, siding with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other corporate interests that claimed the FTC's process in crafting and finalizing the rule did not give industry sufficient "opportunity to assess" the agency's "cost-benefit analysis of alternatives."
After the rule was finalized last October, the FTC—then led by Lina Khan—said it had received more than 16,000 public comments on the proposal, which would have required companies to make it just as easy for consumers to cancel subscriptions as it was to enroll. The agency said the number of subscription-related public complaints rose to nearly 70 per day in 2024, indicating growing anger at companies' predatory tactics.
Khan wrote on social media Tuesday that public comments on the rule were "overwhelmingly" supportive and criticized the Trump FTC for giving industry groups time to block the effort. The rule was originally set to take effect on May 14, but the Trump FTC—now led by Republican Andrew Ferguson and two GOP commissioners—voted on May 9 to delay implementation, citing industry concerns that "it would take a substantial amount of time to come into compliance."
"The rule was set to go into effect in May but this FTC slow-walked it—and now a court has tossed it out, claiming industry didn't get enough of a say," Khan lamented.
Lee Hepner, senior legal counsel at the American Economic Liberties Project, said Tuesday that "the byzantine rulemaking process provides courts with infinite discretion to torpedo rules in service of deep-pocketed corporations and in spite of overwhelming public support."
"The commission received 16,000 public comments on its rule, yet the 8th Circuit has the temerity to suggest the commission failed to provide enough process to the Chamber of Commerce," Hepner added. "Congress gave the FTC the power to stop unfair and deceptive practices."
"If the FTC is serious about affordability for everyday Americans, it must reissue the rule immediately."
Mark Meador, one of just three commissioners left at the FTC following President Donald Trump's firing of the agency's two Democratic members earlier this year, declared following the appeals court decision that the click-to-cancel rule "isn't going into effect for one reason: The Biden FTC cut corners and didn't follow the law."
The American Prospect's David Dayen wrote in response that Meador, a commissioner "who has the ability to reissue the rule," is "more interested in cheering on judicial obstruction than simply saying he will reissue the rule."
Given that Ferguson and Republican FTC Commissioner Melissa Holyoak voted against finalizing the click-to-cancel rule last year, it is unlikely that they will support reviving the rule in the wake of the appeals court decision. Meador was not an FTC commissioner when the rule was finalized.
Nidhi Hegde, executive director of the American Economic Liberties Project, slammed the Trump FTC for delaying the rule's enforcement "long enough for big corporate lobbyists to win in court."
"It's bad enough that the Trump FTC has done nothing to bring down costs for the American people," Hegde said in a statement Tuesday. "Now, by slow-walking a simple, massively popular protection, they've ensured that hardworking people will keep getting stuck with subscriptions they don't want or can't afford from cable companies, gyms, and online services. If the FTC is serious about affordability for everyday Americans, it must reissue the rule immediately."
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Analysis of Lobbying in 2024 Shows Clear Target: A Tax Code Forever Favorable to Corporations
"Conversations on Capitol Hill about federal tax policy were dominated by those representing corporate and wealthy interests," said one leader at Public Citizen.
Apr 10, 2025
As the GOP forges ahead with a tax plan that would disproportionately benefit the wealthy, the watchdog Public Citizen published a report Thursday which found that the vast majority of tax lobbyists' work in 2024 was done on behalf of corporate clients.
Although the Republican tax and spending bill is taking shape in 2025, not 2024, Public Citizen's report suggests that the general thrust of the tax bill—tax cuts that disproportionately benefit the rich and could lead to a massive slashing of programs including Medicaid—can be explained in part due to the power of corporate lobbying.
"Conversations on Capitol Hill about federal tax policy were dominated by those representing corporate and wealthy interests," said Susan Harley, managing director of Public Citizen's Congress Watch division, in a statement Thursday. "The Trump-Republican tax proposal is a policy of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich."
Republicans are aiming to extend expiring provisions of President Donald Trump's 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Acts (TCJA), and also enact additional cuts. On Thursday, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives approved a budget blueprint that gets the GOP one step closer to securing the spending and cuts sought by Trump.
According to Public Citizen's report, most of the corporations and corporate trade associations that were the largest hirers of tax lobbyists in 2024 lobbied specifically on the TCJA.
Most of the TCJA's provisions that impact businesses, like cutting the top corporate income tax rate from 35% to 21%, do not expire—though Trump has said that he would like to see the corporate tax rate further cut, to 15%.
In its analysis, Public Citizen also highlighted that a deduction for "pass-through" businesses—whose owners report their share of profits as taxable income under the individual income tax—is set to expire, though pass-through businesses on average tend to be smaller businesses than their counterparts who pay corporate income tax. Pass-through businesses include sole proprietorships, partnerships, limited liability companies, and S-corporations.
To compile its report, Public Citizen searched all federal lobbying disclosures for 2024 to compile a list of all lobbyists who indicated that they lobbied on "tax issues" (the report notes how they define lobbying on "tax issues").
More than 6,000 lobbyists swarmed Capitol Hill in 2024 to lobby on tax issues, the group found, which amounts to nearly half of all federal lobbyists. Public Citizen highlighted that by comparison, there are only 535 members of Congress.
Out of the top 100 entities hiring the most lobbyists to work on tax issues in 2024, all but two represented corporate interests, according to the report.
The corporate trade group the U.S. Chamber of Commerce topped the list with 99 lobbyists. Other top hirers of tax lobbyists included the telecommunications company Verizon and the global financial technology platform Intuit.
However, according to Public Citizen, counting the number of unique lobbyists does not reveal the "true scope" of lobbying taking place. For example, five new corporations could start lobbying on the same tax issue, but if they hired a lobbyist who had already been working on that tax issue, looking at the individual number of lobbyists would not register this increase in lobbying activity, per the report.
That means that counting the number of "unique lobbyist client relationships" reveals a more accurate picture of lobbying activity.
According to the report, clients sent more than 10,500 lobbyists to influence tax issues on average for each quarter in 2024, and more than 85% of those lobbyists represented corporate interests each quarter.
The report notes that "many of the 15% of entities categorized as not representing corporate interests are likely not lobbying against such interests. Our methodology is conservative. Many nonprofit hospital systems, for example, operate similarly to for-profit entities."
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