Vice President Kamala Harris has won over many business leaders during her abbreviated presidential campaign. However, if Harris gets elected, her choice of giving Federal Trade Commission Chairwoman Lina Khan the boot or allowing her to stay put could put those fragile relationships at risk.
Khan hasn’t been shy during her tenure, since winning Senate confirmation in June 2021, about trying to regulate corporate America, particularly large tech companies, aggressively. She’s turned a lot of people off not just by her modern (read: what critics call radical) approach to antitrust and competition regulation but also by her style and perceived hostility toward free markets.
“A lot of people that are just interested in good governance have not really appreciated her tact and her approach,” said Robert Winterton, director of public affairs at NetChoice.
Under her leadership, Khan has gone after the largest tech companies, with lawsuits against Google, Meta, and Amazon. She’s also targeted monopolies and mergers and pushed for the eradication of noncompete clauses. Beyond Khan’s policy agenda for the FTC, the agency’s tanking employee satisfaction ratings since 2022 have drawn wide notice.
Some celebrate how Khan has taken antitrust from an area only dedicated wonks would talk about to a mainstream political talking point. However, her approach has left many corporations feeling like their every move is being watched and regulated.
“I don’t think the chairwoman or most of the Democrats understand the depth of the harm that she is causing by creating uncertainty around virtually every merger and acquisition in the country,” said Gary Shapiro, CEO of the Consumer Technology Association. “She has abandoned a bipartisan approach to antitrust enforcement.”
Khan’s management style, including a series of rookie mistakes, compounded her problems. The agency has seen high turnover, with former employees complaining about being kept in the dark about key decisions.
“I think it’s just a cautionary lesson, a cautionary tale, that coming in and just disregarding the culture of the place — I just don’t think is a productive way to get one’s ideas put into place. The costs are really high,” New York University professor Lawrence White told the Washington Examiner.
Support from the Left
Hard-left leaders, such as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), who have supported Harris thus far, are heavily in favor of keeping Khan.
“Lina Khan is the best FTC Chair in modern history,” Sanders said recently.
Khan’s supporters are made up of more than prominent hard-left icons. Relatively centrist Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) celebrated Khan’s nomination early in the administration of President Joe Biden.
“Lina’s experience working both in Congress and at the Federal Trade Commission and as an advocate for competitive markets will be vital as we advance efforts to strengthen enforcement and protect consumers,” Klobuchar said at the time.
An even more unexpected political bedfellow is Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH). The Republican vice presidential nominee has praised Khan’s work targeting Big Tech.
Given Khan’s divisive reputation, Harris’s decision will be closely monitored should her Democratic ticket prevail over her Republican rival, former President Donald Trump, and it seems like the Harris campaign knows it.
Thus far, the Democratic candidate has kept away from public conversation about Khan. Tight polls and voter turnout concerns for the 2024 election have made the Harris campaign scared to alienate anyone. However, conversations among the business leaders she’s been courting suggest that Harris’s decision not to weigh in on the FTC’s future is a strategic decision.
Billionaire businessman Mark Cuban, who’s been on the campaign trail for Harris, voiced his concerns over Khan at a Semafor event this month, saying her approach to breaking up tech companies compromises their ability to advance artificial intelligence. Many of the Wall Street executives that Harris has been trying to build relationships with (even hosting a handful at her residence) have been warming to her but want to see more commitment to personnel changes at the FTC.
After the event at her residence, two executives told the Financial Times she’d made commitments to appoint less aggressive officials to the agencies. However, the campaign pushed back on the insinuation that the vice president had made any promises, saying she only discussed policy, not personnel.
Not all Democrats love Khan’s approach
Major Democratic donor Reid Hoffman, who helped found LinkedIn, has also publicly urged Harris to drop Khan if elected. Complicating the matter further, Hoffman has his interests at stake. After Microsoft bought LinkedIn, he was given a seat on the board and, thus, benefited largely from the Microsoft-Activision merger, which the FTC sought to block. Now, the FTC is investigating Microsoft’s proposed acquisition of Inflection AI, another company Hoffman founded.
However, two major donors’ positions do not a possible Harris administration policy make. Joe Van Wye, a strategist with left-wing lobbying firm P Street, told the Washington Examiner the billionaires’ rhetoric was no cause for concern.
“The billionaire sort of wish casting that we’ve seen from folks like Mark Cuban and Barry Diller and Reid Hoffman, I don’t think we’re surprised to see that because they see an opportunity to potentially use their massive microphones and resources to bend these enforcement agencies, back to sort of where they’ve been pre these enforcers,” Van Wye said.
Another factor tipping the scales is Harris isn’t facing the pressure from the progressive wing of the party that Biden did on domestic policy after the brutal 2020 primary (something Harris was availed of by her unorthodox rise to the top of the ticket). With personnel decisions, Winterton said, Biden “really leaned into trying to give the progressive wing of the party a lot of wind.” Most progressive Democrats haven’t made the same vocal demands of Harris they pressed Biden on, given the high stakes of the vice president’s abbreviated White House campaign. As a result, Harris has had the freedom to try to win back the business industry instead.
Already, Harris has positioned herself as better for business than Biden, proposing a capital gains tax rate significantly lower than his (28% versus nearly 40%). Some see Harris’s campaign strategy as an outstretched arm to the industries feeling abandoned or bullied by Biden.
“Strategically, you could argue either way: maybe they need to keep Lina Khan to reassure the left, or maybe the left is simply not a strong ally of hers,” Winterton said. “And therefore, you know, playing ball with that is not really going to get her anything.”
Winterton said if Harris keeps Khan on, it’ll also send a strong message to the business industry, from which her campaign has been bragging about getting support.
“It would show that they’re just talking to it,” he continued. “It was just campaign stuff to get the funders that she needed and the donors that she needed to spend the money that she needed to win, and not really any sort of genuine move of, hey, this is an area that Biden went too far on, and we’re seeking to correct.”
Yet Khan might be too embedded in the Democratic Party to jettison. She’s been campaigning with Democrats, such as the party’s Senate nominee, Rep. Ruben Gallego (AZ), whom Republicans scrutinized in a recent letter to Khan that cited the Hatch Act.
Democrats all over the country have campaigned off and praised the work of the FTC and the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice, cracking down on what they call “corporate greed.” Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), a member of the Senate Appropriations subcommittee, helped increase the budget of the DOJ’s antitrust division, which works side by side with Khan, by 24%.
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Another positive sign for Khan enthusiasts: If Republicans win control of the Senate, Harris may keep Khan right where she is to avoid a tough nomination battle since she’s already been overwhelmingly confirmed.
Van Wye said nothing is for certain, but the signals coming out of the Harris campaign regarding continuing Biden’s legacy with harsh antitrust enforcement are “fairly positive.” Whether that’s his own version of wish casting remains to be seen.