Lina Khan, the Biden-era Federal Trade Commission chairwoman who questioned mergers and championed antitrust enforcement, has returned to the spotlight as part of New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s transition team. Khan said she wanted to “set a new model for Democratic governance” by helping Mamdani put together his administration.
Mamdani is a self-described socialist, though President Donald Trump has called him a communist. Khan is a longtime ally of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), both of whom strongly backed Mamdani in the mayoral contest. Khan once proclaimed that “all decisions are political insofar as government agencies are bringing them,” when discussing whether Amazon should be broken up.
So, it’s not surprising to see her team up with Mamdani.
“Khan and Mamdani are ideological soulmates who will once again demonstrate all the well-worn but seemingly forgotten lessons of the last century — socialism is the road to poverty and serfdom,” quipped Robert Bork Jr. of the Antitrust Education Project.
Whatever team Mamdani puts together, Khan’s involvement will likely continue — for good or ill, toward New Yorkers and Americans.
When Khan was removed as FTC chairwoman, Trump promised her replacement, Andrew M. Ferguson, would be the most “pro-innovation FTC Chair in our Country’s History.” Wall Street believed the FTC would be less willing to challenge mergers and acquisitions or attempt to break large corporations into parts. Analysts and Ferguson himself suggested he’d be more of a beat cop, instead of an aggressive enforcer.
“If a merger doesn’t violate the law, we will get out of the way as quickly as possible, letting businesses grow and innovate,” Ferguson told alumni of the University of Virginia Darden School of Business in August.
However, Ferguson’s record in the job has proved inconsistent with that statement. Under him, the FTC has continued antitrust lawsuits against Amazon, Meta, Google, and Ticketmaster and opened new fronts against Zillow and Redfin.
Ferguson also continued Khan’s skepticism over big mergers — revealing new guidelines that seemingly target private equity and technology companies. This included filing suit against two medical device companies that wanted to join forces, despite there being no evidence of an “overlapping” market.
So much for a return to normal under Trump 2.0 — the administration that promised to end overbearing regulations has kept Khan’s antitrust crusade alive.
The moves haven’t surprised free-market tech analysts such as Jessica Melugin at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Melguin, who is also a Washington Examiner magazine contributor, believes progressives and the “New Right” dislike Big Tech for different reasons. The Left complains about Big Tech’s labor practices and market success. The “New Right” argues that Big Tech censored conservatives and pushes an ideological agenda.
Regardless of the why, Melugin suggested, “The levers of government power remain effective for whoever is in power. Antitrust is a very big lever.”
That could be why some populist Republicans continue to go down Khan’s extreme left-wing path, despite significant opposition to that approach from MAGA base favorites such as Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), who battled with Khan on a near-daily basis for years as chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), who has long championed a return to the consumer welfare standard approach to antitrust.
That approach, favored by Lee and most conservatives, focuses on moving against monopolists or oligopolists where their market dominance adversely affects consumers in terms of actual pricing of goods and services.
The regulatory environment feels contradictory: The Trump administration promises to make it easier for businesses to succeed, yet, as Joshua Withrow observes, it often seems at war with itself. Withrow, a tech and innovation policy fellow at R Street Institute, said one camp wants to see tech companies drive innovation and international competitiveness.
“Ultimately, the logic behind this populist conservative antitrust movement and that of Lina Khan — ‘big is bad’ — leads to a similar policy outcome,” Withrow said.
In many respects, Trump himself has lined up with the tech side of the argument as opposed to Khan-friendly voices. This may stand to reason — Trump is something of a tech innovator in his own right with Truth Social and TrumpCoin. He won massive backing from Silicon Valley leaders during his 2024 reelection campaign and the transition ahead of his second inauguration.
MAMDANI NAMES ALL-FEMALE TRANSITION TEAM HEADLINED BY FORMER FTC CHAIRWOMAN LINA KHAN
The other side, more associated with fringe players such as antitrust hawk Assistant Attorney General Gail Slater, who has fallen out with key Trump administration players over alleged self-serving press leaks, unfortunately remains focused on using a blunt antitrust hammer on Big Tech. Slater, who, like Khan, is an immigrant to the U.S. from Europe and seems to take a more European than traditional American approach to antitrust, is one of the names generally mentioned as aligning with Khan in contrast to the GOP writ large.
Whether the FTC reverses course remains to be seen. Neil Chilson, the head of AI policy at the Abundance Institute, many of whose fans have been pushing back on Mamdani’s approach to policy, told me there’s still time. Trump “recognizes that America’s tech companies are vital to global AI leadership,” he said. “The FTC should finish cleaning up the dregs of Khan’s radical agenda.”
Taylor Millard is a freelance journalist who lives in Virginia.