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Lina Khan, the former chair of the Federal Trade Commission, said Democrats must respond to Department of Government Efficiency-led cutbacks with a new vision for effective federal agencies in a lecture at the Institute of Politics on Thursday night.
Khan encouraged Democrats to design a “battle plan” by asking how they could better deliver “on-the-ground results” to the American people.
“These are not small questions,” she added. “But if Democrats are serious about not just taking power again, but also wielding it effectively, we’d be wise to grapple with them now.”
She aimed to answer similar questions during her tenure at the FTC. She discussed her efforts to refocus the agency and modernize decades-old antitrust policies at the fifth James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Lecture on Economic Inequality.
Khan, who currently teaches at Columbia Law School, rose to prominence in 2017 for her article in the Yale Law Journal on Amazon’s anticompetitive structure, which she wrote as a third-year law student.
In the piece she criticized the traditional antitrust framework in the modern market, and then later implemented that philosophy at the FTC. As a Biden-appointee, she garnered national attention for her bold legal action against corporate players, including Amazon and Meta.
Her mission marked a structural effort to activate the agency and create impactful antitrust legislation after Reagan-era policies discouraged government intervention, Khan explained at the lecture.
“Just as the Constitution creates checks and balances in our government safeguarding against concentrated political control, anti-monopoly laws create checks against concentrations of economic power,” Khan said. “My mandate was to invigorate antitrust and consumer protection and ensure that it was tackling the problems in the modern economy.”
To do so, Khan said her agency opted for direct policy decisions, including implementing a clean ban on non-compete agreements and strengthening anti-merger enforcement.
Khan has garnered bipartisan praise for her muscular anti-trust strategy. As recently as April, she received widespread attention for appearing alongside right-wing populist Steve Bannon at a summit on taking down big tech. At the event, Bannon called Khan “one of the more important political figures in this country” and advised Democrats to listen to her more closely.
Still, Khan described the current administration’s policies as a “mixed bag.” While she said there is bipartisan momentum for anti-trust policy in areas beyond tech — including healthcare and agriculture —Khan criticized the current FTC for its “much more permissive and eager” attitude towards potentially anti-competitive mergers.
The FTC under the Trump administration has continued to litigate its lawsuits against Amazon and Meta, but Khan said tech executives have significant influence over this White House’s policies.
“I think there’s a real ideological fight in the party between the more corporatist wing and the more populist wing,” she added. “We’re going to have to wait and see.”
Regardless of where Republicans land on antitrust, Khan’s efforts at the FTC have raised the public salience of the issue. She made increasing accessibility a key focus of her tenure by crowdsourcing feedback from Americans at regular open meetings — and became a household name in the process.
Harvard Kennedy School professor of economics Jason Furman ’92, who moderated the question and answer portion of her lecture, was quick to praise Khan’s popular appeal.
“If a decade ago we had invited a law professor here to Harvard to talk about antitrust, the conversation would have been in the law school, not in this room,” Furman said. “It would have used a lot of words like snip tests and HHI, and would have been attended by about 12 people.”
“This has been a rather different talk,” he said.
—Staff writer Elise A. Spenner can be reached at elise.spenner@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X at @EliseSpenner.
