Last week, on April 10, 2025, the U.S. Senate confirmed Mark Meador as the FTC’s third Republican commissioner. Meador joins Chairman Ferguson and Commissioner Melissa Holyoak on what is now a three commissioner panel (all Republicans) following President Trump’s termination of the two commissioners appointed by President Biden, Alvaro Bedoya and Rebecca Kelly Slaughter. Bedoya and Slaughter have challenged their terminations in federal court in D.C., alleging that the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1935 decision in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States prohibits the president from removing FTC commissioners without cause. The case may ultimately land at the Supreme Court, where the Trump Administration would likely urge the Justices to overturn Humphrey’s Executor, giving the president complete authority to fire agency heads. In the meantime, all signs point to an approach to antitrust enforcement under the three Republican commissioners that departs from past Republican administrations.
For example, in February, Chairman Ferguson announced that the FTC and U.S. Department of Justice’s joint 2023 Merger Guidelines will remain “in effect and are the framework for this agency’s merger-review analysis.” The 2023 Merger Guidelines, implemented under the Biden Administration, represent a marked departure from longstanding U.S. merger enforcement policy. Notably, the agencies in the 2023 Merger Guidelines reverted to presumptions not relied on since the 1960s about the likelihood that proposed mergers between competitors (i.e. “horizontal” mergers) will substantially lessen competition in moderately and highly concentrated markets. The agencies also expressed skepticism toward mergers involving “vertical” integration, like the acquisition by a distributor of a supplier, that threaten to create a firm that may limit access of rivals to products or services used to compete. Nevertheless, while Ferguson acknowledged that he had “been asked a number of times about the fate of the 2023 Guidelines,” he chose to “prize stability and disfavor wholesale rescission,” concluding also that there is “good reason to retain them.” In short, the announcement leaves intact a set of guidelines that exposes more deals to scrutiny than the previous guidelines.
Moreover, Ferguson’s announcement followed the sweeping overhaul of the premerger notification form and reporting process under the Hart-Scott-Rodino (HSR) Act that took effect the week before on February 10. In October 2024, the FTC, with the support of the DOJ, voted unanimously to adopt substantial revisions to the HSR Act that vastly increase the upfront burdens on transacting parties. But after President Trump’s election in November, many observers expected that the new administration would rescind the overhaul or at least defer the effective date of the new rules to take a fresh look. Instead, when the new rules took effect on February 10 without any action by the Trump Administration, Chairman Ferguson endorsed the overhaul enthusiastically. “The old rules were passed nearly 50 years ago, and updates were long overdue. The updates were the product of bipartisan consensus and will allow us to find anticompetitive mergers efficiently, while more quickly getting out of the way of deals that will benefit the American people,” Ferguson commented on social media. While the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has filed a lawsuit challenging the FTC’s authority to issue the new HSR form and rules, and one congressman has introduced a bill to unwind them, the new regime has been embraced by the regulators. If the first quarter is any indication, the FTC’s aggressive approach to antitrust enforcement is here to stay.
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