Antitrust should be about outcomes, not outrage, and we hope it will soon revert back to that principle again.
As the Biden administration walked out the door, it left behind a flood of antitrust activity — dozens of actions rushed into motion in its final months, many of them built on shaky legal ground and thin economic logic. Now, the Trump administration is beginning to dig out from under that pile — and, in the process, is returning antitrust policy to something closer to normal focus on what’s best for consumers and not career-seeking regulators. Already, some of the most high-profile cases have been axed, and one can hope that the new Federal Trade Commission will follow up with similar decisions in the future.
One of the clearest signals of change came with the FTC’s recent dismissal of its case against PepsiCo, a case the Biden administration filed just three days before Trump took office. The case relied on a rarely invoked 1930s statute and offered little in the way of consumer harm as the company has plenty of notable competitors, starting with a little company called Coca-Cola and a myriad of other soft drinks. Even inside the agency, it was viewed as a political maneuver due to lack of an economic rationale. Trump-appointed FTC chairman Andrew Ferguson called it a “legally dubious partisan stunt” and made clear that taxpayer dollars shouldn’t be used for last-minute regulatory activism.
Visa, too, was targeted in the final hours of the Biden presidency. The DOJ scrambled to keep its case alive in the Southern District of New York , a court it frequently relied on during the Biden years. With no real evidence of anti-competitive conduct and rising payment volumes across the industry, the case was a weak attempt to paint success as a problem and blame a private company for inflation.
These were not isolated missteps. In its closing weeks, the Biden team moved to initiate or sustain dozens of antitrust actions, including suits against companies like John Deere, where regulators again leaned on ideological barometers rather than economics or a clear view of the law. By already dismissing the PepsiCo case, the Trump administration has signaled a desire to rescind these rushed, politically driven cases, which border on legal malpractice.
Some of the Trump antitrust team’s course corrections have been quieter. For example, last month, the DOJ settled and ended its challenge to the HPE–Juniper merger, a move applauded by many legal analysts. The case had been approved by an acting official before Trump’s DOJ leadership was in place, and it made little sense: HPE-Juniper wouldn’t even be the U.S. market leader with an approved merger, and the deal would have enhanced U.S. competitiveness against China’s Huawei, which is the global juggernaut and remains banned due to national security concerns.
Another hallmark of Biden’s approach was the FTC’s persistent effort to block Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision, which the Trump FTC recently abandoned. The Biden team argued the merger would harm competition in the video game market, despite the fact that Microsoft was acquiring the third-largest publisher, not the first, and competitors like Sony were thriving. The case became a poster child for enforcement unmoored from economic reality. Even after setbacks in court and widespread international approval of the deal, the FTC doubled down, filing emergency motions and dragging the matter out long after the legal basis had worn thin.
These cases all shared the same flaw: not evidence of monopoly power or harm, but an ideological view that equated size with abuse.
Trump’s antitrust team is signaling a break. It has made it clear that while bigness might warrant investigation, being big is a sign of success and not a crime in itself. Gail Slater, the new antitrust chief at the DOJ, has emphasized that enforcement must be grounded in economic analysis, not political theater. At April’s Little Tech Summit, she stated, “We are expected to have a testifying expert” before bringing cases to trial. In an interview, she warned that past overreach attempts “[sapped] economic opportunity by stifling rather than promoting competition,” and added: “If you’re doing a merger that’s benign, we’ll just get out of the way.”
These comments represent a return to the principles that once defined U.S. antitrust policy: a reliance on facts, a focus on the competitive marketplace and consumer welfare, and a healthy respect for economic freedom. The goal is not to shield successful large firms from scrutiny, but to keep our government at arm’s length and make it accountable to legal standards, not political moods.
Although these actions are encouraging for a potential new direction at the FTC, there are other actions that have raised concern among some observers. One is the new FTC’s acceptance of the Biden administration’s merger guidelines that do not even reference the consumer welfare criterion that has been the legal standard used by the courts since 1979. Certainly, we can do better than just adopting the misguided guidelines introduced by Lina Khan’s FTC. Also, the consumer welfare standard that is often focused on excessive pricing is hard to reconcile with the Trump administration’s new FTC going after successful, and therefore large, tech companies whose services are free to consumers.
The Biden administration used antitrust as a tool of industrial policy and ideological messaging. The Trump administration appears to be aiming to restore it as a more neutral, economics-based safeguard for competitive markets. If that is indeed where it ends up, economists, investors, and, most importantly, consumers should applaud. Antitrust should be about outcomes, not outrage, and we hope it will soon revert back to that principle again.