Congressional Republicans have been laboring for the past 14 months to undo the damage former President Joe Biden inflicted on the U.S. economy.
They’ve made remarkable progress — having a Republican in the White House makes a world of difference — but there’s one area that needs more attention: the Federal Trade Commission.
The FTC — under the leadership of Biden nominee Lina Khan, who went on to lead the transition team for Zohran Mamdani — spent years targeting American businesses. FTC lawsuits harassed companies while costing taxpayers millions, if not tens of millions, of dollars to pay for outside experts and other litigation needs.
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It’s time for Congress to ask why.
A good place to start would be for the Senate commerce committee to hold a hearing on the FTC. Remarkably, no such hearing has been held for several years, even though Congress recently issued a comprehensive report that detailed the many different ways in which Khan tried (and often succeeded) to kneecap American businesses.
The report pointed out that Khan betrayed the commission’s independent mission by abusing her authority, trampling on the due-process rights of regulated parties, upending the rule of law, and violating ethics standards.
How to redress this? One option would be to dig into Khan’s underhanded tactics so they can’t be repeated. Khan did a disservice to the select corps of professionals at the FTC, and they made their displeasure known. In 2022, just 44% of FTC employees said they had a high level of respect for the commission’s senior leaders — a remarkable decline from 2020, when the figure was 83%.
In 2023, Republican FTC Commissioner Christine Wilson resigned from the commission and wrote a remarkable article spelling out why. She highlighted Khan’s “disregard for the rule of law and due process.”
At the top of the list for any hearing would be resolving the cases that Khan and her FTC cronies pursued, with a special focus on the flurry of activity between President Donald Trump’s election and his taking office.
It seems that Khan set out to ram through as many complaints as possible before her chairwomanship came to an end. One case was filed the day before the 2024 election, and nearly 10, if not more, followed before Jan. 20, 2025. Three of these are still pending with the FTC.
One of the pending cases, against Southern Glazer’s Wine and Spirits, is long overdue for dismissal by the FTC. It is the only one of the bunch that will directly raise prices on consumers if it proceeds.
The case was filed in December 2024. It charged that the company, which is the largest distributor of wine and spirits in the U.S., was “engaged in anticompetitive and unlawful price discrimination” by offering discounts to bulk-purchase stores such as Costco.
Alas, nowhere in the complaint did the FTC show that there was any decline in consumer welfare, which has been the longtime foundation of American antitrust law.
The FTC reviewed more than 17 million of Southern Glazer’s transactions during its three-year investigation of the company. As noted recently in a court filing, the FTC couldn’t name a single violation of the law as justification for bringing the complaint. A lawyer for the commission even admitted in court last week that he could not identify any “diverted consumer” or “retailer suffering.”
The current head of the FTC, Andrew Ferguson, was a commissioner when the Southern Glazer’s case was filed. He issued a blistering dissent and knocked down one of the central arguments for the complaint: that price discrimination caused a substantial diversion of sales from the disfavored retailer to a competing favored retailer.
“I simply have not seen evidence,” Ferguson wrote, “that any diversions, much less substantial diversions, are attributable to lower prices offered by the favored purchasers, let alone ones attributable to lower input prices.”
Ferguson also pointed out that the price differentials cited by the commission in its complaint are a byproduct of different costs associated with serving large chain stores and small, often independent stores: “Large orders, infrequently delivered in bulk to loading docks at central distribution centers, are less costly per unit to deliver than small orders, frequently delivered to individual stores — often to individual shelves or refrigerator units. The Act does not impose liability for pricing differently on the basis of those costs.”
An FTC mandate against this practice would represent a remarkable intrusion into everyday business practices. And it would force retailers to raise their prices. How would that be a win for consumers?
Ferguson has done a great job of turning the page from Biden to Trump, dispensing with most of Khan’s cases and restoring consumer welfare to the heart of antitrust enforcement. So why hasn’t he closed the same Southern Glazer’s case he opposed?
Khan, meanwhile, was last seen dispensing policy advice to New York’s radical left-wing mayor, Mamdani. Predictably, Mamdani’s policies are helping to drive people out of New York and to Florida — so much so that the state’s Democratic governor, Kathy Hochul, recently made a public plea for them to return.
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Khan contributed to an erosion of America’s tax base — and that erosion will continue until the FTC dismisses the cases she launched, particularly Southern Glazer’s.
Sooner or later, Congress needs to hold hearings on her disastrous legacy and other problems at the FTC. Hopefully sooner.
John M. Pierce, a trial attorney and managing partner of John Pierce Law, is the founder of the National Constitutional Law Union, where he defends Americans against government overreach and Big Tech tyranny. He has represented high-profile clients, including Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, and over 50 Jan. 6 defendants. His work has been shared on social media by President Donald Trump and many other high-profile conservative influencers.