Trump is trying to fire antitrust commissioners. They say it’s “blatantly illegal”

Two Democratic antitrust commissioners fighting in court for their jobs this week blasted Trump’s attempt to fire them. In a court filing, they said the move would destabilize the economy and “brush aside a century of precedent.” 

The Federal Trade Commission is one of two federal agencies tasked with enforcing antitrust law. In the past several years it has sued huge health care conglomerates, as well as big tech companies like Amazon, Apple, Google and Meta. 

It also blocked the merger of grocery giants Kroger and Albertsons. So the FTC might not be terribly popular in some corporate boardrooms these days. Anticompetitive practices by giant players are thought to have resulted in lower wages and higher prices for consumers.

The other federal antitrust watchdog, the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department, has roots going back to 1903. But that department is overseen by the Attorney General, a presidential appointee. 

In 1914, Congress passed the Federal Trade Commission Act creating an antitrust watchdog that is more insulated from politics. It provided for a minimum number of appointees from each party, provided them with seven-year terms and allowed reappointment. Crucially, presidents can only remove them for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.”

Despite that, news broke in March that Trump was trying to fire commissioners Alvaro Bedoya and Rebecca Slaughter, both Democratic appointees. Trump was doing so without alleging any of the deficiencies required by the law to allow for their dismissal. 

In a social media post, Bedoya said Trump was trying to do a favor for his ultra-rich supporters.

“Now, the president wants the FTC to be a lapdog for his golfing buddies,” Bedoya wrote.

Trump has also tried to remove commissioners from independent agencies such as the Federal Election Commission, the National Labor Relations Board, the Merit Systems Protections Board and the National Transportation Safety Board. Critics, including Slaughter and Bedoya, said that undermining such independent agencies would undermine faith in and the stability of the national economy.

In a court brief justifying the FTC firings, Trump’s lawyers wrote that following the provisions of the Federal Trade Commission Act would improperly limit the president’s authority.

“An order requiring the president to reinstate officials he has chosen to remove from office would be an extraordinary intrusion on the president’s exclusive authority to exercise control over the executive branch,” the filing said, according to Newsweek.

Lawyers for the Democratic FTC commissioners said that’s a gross misreading of the law and history.

Trump is asking the court “to brush aside a century of precedent in favor of an untenable reading of (the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Seila Law v Consumer Financial Protection Bureau) that ignores broad swaths of that opinion, misconstrues the FTC’s authority, side-steps much of U.S. history, and would overturn several Supreme Court decisions and invalidate two-dozen statutes adopted and adhered to by nearly every President and Congress over the last 150 years,” Bedoya and Slaughter’s lawyers said in a court filing. 

Late last month, a Trump ally, Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, made another move that critics said was intended to protect the president’s wealthy supporters — particularly Elon Musk, the world’s richest man — from antitrust enforcement. From his perch as chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Jordan tried to insert in a spending bill a measure that would move the FTC’s personnel and funding to the Justice Department. 

However, it wouldn’t have moved the FTC’s unique enforcement powers along with them. Jordan later withdrew the measure.

The Democratic FTC commissioners are fighting in court to stop Trump’s attempt to fire them, calling it “blatantly illegal.” They and lawyers for the president are asking the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to decide the case on an expedited basis.

In a written statement, a lawyer for a firm representing the Democratic commissioners, Clarick, Gueron, Reisbaum, said Trump is ignoring past decisions of the judiciary.

“… it’s undisputed that his attempted firings violate the plain language of the FTC Act, and the President’s claim to inherent executive authority to fire FTC Commissioners defies 90 years of Supreme Court precedent,” the lawyer, Aaron Crowell, said.

A lawyer for another group representing Slaughter and Bedoya, Protect Democracy, said Trump is trying to ignore not only the courts, but Congress as well. And in so doing, the president threatens to destabilize the U.S. economy, said the lawyer, Amit Agarwal.

“Congress had good reasons for protecting regulators from at-will removal, not the least of which is that agencies like the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Reserve need to have the ability to make critical decisions with integrity and to apply the law without fear or favor,”Agarwal said.  “When the Supreme Court settled this dispute nine decades ago, it decided in favor of Congress’s right to protect the public interest. We hope the courts do so again.”