Trump’s Illegal Attacks on Regulatory Agencies Are a Gift to Corporations

On Tuesday we learned that President Trump illegally attempted to fire two Federal Trade Commission (FTC) commissioners, the administration’s latest effort to bend regulatory agencies to its will and allow the powerful to rig the economy with impunity. 

These unprecedented power grabs—from the executive order asserting that the White House must review every regulation and can block agency spending, to the unlawful order to halt work at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), to court-blocked attempts to terminate Senate-confirmed members of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and Federal Labor Relations Authority (FLRA)—aren’t just attacks on our public institutions. They are attacks on the public’s ability to constrain corporate power and shape markets for the public good.

As I learned firsthand at the FTC, these agencies are essential to checking concentrated wealth and power. Their job is to regulate complex markets on behalf of the public—the workers, consumers, and small businesses that participate in markets but don’t have the power to protect their own interests. As is their original intent, they actually serve to support healthy markets for all participants: In FDR’s time, when the very viability of capitalism was in question, the SEC’s first chair Joseph Kennedy believed regulation could rebuild public confidence in markets that had driven the Great Depression. And the SEC did just that, helping to shore up our economic system at a time of collapse by making it more stable and predictable. Even big and mid-sized businesses need a predictable and reliable regulatory environment to inspire confidence and plan for the future (which is why abrupt efforts to dismantle the CFPB spooked even the banks and financial firms it’s tasked with regulating.)

In the last few decades, the need to restore public faith in the marketplace has been clear, with corporate concentration leading to record profits while working people struggle to make ends meet. And in recent years, we’ve seen these agencies live up to the task, finding the will to exercise existing tools to their fullest extent and rack up concrete wins for families.

At the FTC, we used our rulemaking power to regulate coercive and anticompetitive noncompete restrictions in labor contracts, flexed our power to study markets to scrutinize pharmacy benefit managers and the business models for large language AI models, and re-tethered our review of corporate mergers to their original statutory text and case law to support more searching review and prevent concentration at its source. Our actions aimed to unleash worker power, lower prices and support consumer choice, and drive market innovation and resilience. 

The NLRB made similar strides on the labor front, including its groundbreaking Cemex decision that protects workers’ right to organize a union, its Amazon decision asserting that employers cannot hold mandatory captive audience meetings as a union-busting technique, and its McLaren McComb decision, which ensures workers can share information about their working conditions and not be subject to the kind of nondisclosure and confidentiality provisions that perpetuate discrimination and harassment.

It is not a coincidence that these agencies Congress—not the president—created to work for the American people have been at the center of the current administration’s actions. Neutering regulators by undermining their independence and attacking their rulemaking is a direct play to let corporations make their own rules generally, and pull favors from the president specifically. And in a moment when the president is advertising Teslas on the White House lawn, and his family is in talks for a stake in crypto exchange Binance’s US arm, anyone angling to replace one of the illegally fired agency commissioners would be well aware of where the president stands with certain companies. These attacks, combined with the same slash-and-burn destruction the rest of the government has been subject to in the first two months of the administration, constitute a concerted effort to enfeeble the protective power of government and reinforce Americans’ skepticism of our public institutions at a time when we need them most. 

The illegal attempt to fire FTC commissioners Tuesday is but one piece of a larger agenda to ensure that private interests take precedence over the public good. FDR knew the dangers here: “The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself.” These illegal firings, and the deregulatory agenda of which they are a part, cannot be tolerated.

If you ask Eleanor

“The government has the responsibility for the well-being of all its citizens, and it cannot afford to let any private industry disrupt the nation’s economy.“

– Eleanor Roosevelt, My Day  (March 4, 1950)