A March profile in the Wall Street Journal spotlighted Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson as earning the respect of President Donald Trump for aggressively reshaping the agency.
Ferguson served as a commissioner on the FTC since 2023, often clashing with Biden-era FTC Chairwoman Lina Khan, who, as a law professor, rose to fame as a champion of hipster antitrust theories. While occasionally making common cause with populists, the Khan FTC aggressively filed enforcement actions across all corners of the economy, from John Deere to Pepsi to a 7-Eleven franchise in Florida.
Ferguson was elevated to FTC chairman in January 2025. One of his pledges was to roll back the Khan agenda, stating that the FTC “must be mindful not to stretch the scope of consumer-protection laws beyond their rightful purpose. We must stay in our lane.” Now more than one year into his tenure as chairman, has Ferguson achieved those goals, and what does his first year portend for the second year and beyond?
ONE LAST BIDEN FTC LAWSUIT THREATENS BULK DISCOUNTS AMERICANS DEPEND ON
Ferguson has made measurable changes to the FTC, but critics of the Khan FTC want to see more action. There are a few pending Biden-era FTC initiatives that appear ripe for redirection.
One area is the FTC’s use of the Robinson-Patman Act. In basic terms, the Robinson-Patman Act forbids businesses from charging different prices to different purchasers if the intent is predatory. Khan aggressively interpreted “predatory” to reach into what critics said were standard business practices that benefit consumers.
In January 2025, the Khan FTC sued Pepsi for offering discount costs to wholesale stores that agreed to bulk orders, allegedly harming other stores. Illustrating the difficulty of Robinson-Patman Act enforcement, the FTC was criticized for suing a business for lowering prices on drinks and snacks during a time of inflation. Ferguson dropped the Pepsi lawsuit last year, bluntly calling it “a nakedly political effort to commit this administration to pursuing little more than a hunch that Pepsi had violated the law.”
The Khan FTC also sued Southern Glazer’s, a major distributor of wine and spirits, on similar grounds for offering discount pricing to similar wholesale shoppers. Before his elevation to chairman, Ferguson opposed filing the Southern Glazer’s suit. That case remains pending, but might be headed toward the same fate as the case against Pepsi. In a late March discovery filing, the FTC struggled to identify harmed consumers or businesses. If Ferguson wishes to pull the plug on certain cases, whether for policy reasons or simply to save government resources, Southern Glazer’s appears to be a prime candidate for dismissal.
The FTC also initially defended the Khan FTC rewrite of the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act reporting rules that companies must follow when they plan to merge. Under the proposed changes, businesses were required to disclose large amounts of internal materials, including strategy documents, employee data, and records from past transactions. The FTC argued that this additional data, beyond basic information about the deal at hand, was needed to holistically review transactions.
Businesses warned the new rule would add hundreds of hours of legal work and millions in costs for deals that posed little risk of monopolization. In February, a federal court struck down the rule, agreeing the commission had gone too far. The FTC is still appealing the decision, but it recently requested comments on possible amendments to the rule. Perhaps the FTC will back away from its defense of the HSR rules and implement newer regulations that are less onerous, at least in the first instance.
In short, Ferguson’s first year brought plenty of 180-degree policy turns, ranging from diversity, equity, and inclusion programs to significantly reducing the number of proposed business mergers the agency challenges (with domestic merger value in the first quarter of 2026 increasing from this time last year). Other changes have not been as abrupt but should be coming.
The overall policy under Ferguson has been consistent with Trump’s August 2025 executive order revoking much of the Khan agenda. Ferguson praised that policy shift, stating, “the now-withdrawn Executive Order encouraged top-down competition regulations, and established a flawed philosophical underpinning for the Biden-Harris Administration’s undue hostility toward mergers and acquisitions.”
THE FTC’S WAR ON LOW PRICES ISN’T OVER YET
As Ferguson enters his second full year at the helm of the FTC, he still has many opportunities to chart his own distinct path.
His enforcement agenda is likely to remain a deliberate one, intervening when consumers are directly harmed by entrenched business, and one that distinctly prioritizes job creators and consumers.
Brian H. Pandya is a partner and nationally recognized antitrust lawyer at Duane Morris LLP. He served as a deputy associate attorney general in the Department of Justice from 2019 to 2021. The views stated in this article are personal opinions of the author based on current events and do not necessarily reflect the views of Duane Morris or its clients.