America is racing to lead the world in artificial intelligence, chips, and other key technologies. Winning requires investment, fast growth, and rules that encourage risk-taking. New proposals from the Federal Trade Commission and Justice Department move in the opposite direction. They would make it harder, slower, and more expensive to create, build, and grow innovative companies.
The Trump administration has focused on cutting red tape, boosting growth, and strengthening American technology leadership. Regulators should support those goals, not undermine them. More bureaucracy means more delays, less investment, and slower innovation.
Innovation depends on a simple cycle. Entrepreneurs start companies. Investors fund bold ideas. Larger firms often buy promising startups and help them reach global markets. Founders and investors then use those rewards to build the next generation of companies. That cycle drives American growth and delivers better products at lower prices.
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Most breakthrough technologies start in young companies willing to take risks. Those firms need capital. Investors need a realistic path to earn a return. One key path investors rely on is acquisition. When larger companies buy successful startups, founders are rewarded, investors reinvest, and consumers get new technologies fast.
Too many policymakers now view mergers with suspicion. We saw that in the previous administration’s disastrous challenges to Amazon-iRobot and Frontier-Spirit. This is what happens when regulators presume acquisitions only help investors and founders and ignore real economic and societal benefits of acquisitions. It’s not just about avoiding bankruptcy. It’s about supporting the cycle and ingredients of innovation, including small company acquisitions.
Europe offers a warning. It has world-class talent, strong universities, and plenty of capital. Yet it has struggled to turn those strengths into global technology leadership, and its economy has stagnated for decades while the U.S. economy has grown. Excessive regulation slows growth, fragments markets, and makes it harder for new firms to scale. America has led because it has trusted markets more and bureaucracy less.
That advantage is now at risk. The FTC and DOJ want to expand Hart-Scott-Rodino premerger reporting requirements beyond what has long been required. In plain English, companies would face more paperwork, higher costs, and longer delays before completing deals. Large corporations may absorb those costs. Startups often cannot. Every new filing and legal review adds friction. Friction slows deals. Slower deals reduce investment. Less investment means fewer new ideas reach the market.
The stakes are especially high in the global race for AI, semiconductors, and other advanced technologies. America should make it easier to hire talent, form partnerships, and move capital to promising ideas. Instead, regulators are considering rules that could pull ordinary talent deals and other nontraditional arrangements into broad government review. That goes too far.
Regulators should stop mergers that harm consumers or break antitrust laws. But there is a clear difference between enforcing the law and adding unnecessary burdens to transactions that are overwhelmingly pro-competitive and pro-innovation.
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For 250 years, America has grown by rewarding builders, supporting open markets, and allowing successful companies to scale. We cannot expect to out-innovate China while regulating like Europe. We need less delay, less bureaucracy, and more confidence in the system that made America the world’s innovation leader.
The Trump administration has worked hard to cut red tape and unleash innovation. That is why it is so puzzling to see proposals that would make life harder for entrepreneurs, investors, and growing companies. The FTC and DOJ should reject these changes and preserve a premerger system that supports investment, competition, and American technological leadership.
Gary Shapiro is the executive chairman at the Consumer Technology Association.