29-04-2025
Justice Department Introduces 'America First Antitrust' Policy
Abigail Slater, US assistant attorney general nominee for US President Donald Trump, during a Senate ... More Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing in Washington, DC, US, on Wednesday, Feb. 12, 2025. Democratic senators pressed President Donald Trump's nominee for Deputy Attorney General, Todd Blanche, on politicization of the Justice Department and recent efforts to gather names of FBI agents who worked on cases related to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol. Photographer: Daniel Heuer/Bloomberg
Justice Department Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust Gail Slater introduced 'America First Antitrust' in her first formal address as DOJ's chief antitrust enforcer. Her remarks, delivered at Notre Dame Law School on April 28, explained that this policy centers on protecting individual liberty from both government and corporate tyranny. While details will be filled in later, Slater's speech stated that America First antitrust is law enforcement, not regulation. She also emphasized that anticompetitive government regulation can serve corporate interests rather than the American people and drown out new innovations.
Key Principles
Slater said that America First Antitrust will have 3 key features:
Protecting Individual Liberty
Slater outlined 'the first principle of America First Antitrust – antitrust enforcement serves the deep-rooted conservative goal of protecting individual liberty from the tyranny of coercive monopoly power.'
In her view, antitrust 'serves those goals where it matters most, to protect our liberty online and to ensure that we protect Americans on pocketbook issues such as housing, healthcare, groceries, transportation, insurance, entertainment, and similar markets that directly impact their lives.'
Slater grounded antitrust in American history.
She noted that in the 18th century, American concerns about abusive royally-granted monopolies (such as the East India Company whose tea was destroyed in the Boston Tea Party) played a role in spurring the American Revolution.
In the 19th century, public concern turned to 'a new kind of monopoly—a private empire of oil, railroad, and agricultural robber barons.'
Congress took note and enacted the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, which 'preserves liberty by promoting economic competition that benefits consumers, workers, inventors, and other trading partners in the free markets.'
According to Slater, Sherman Act principles now need to be applied to new sorts of digital platform monopolies, which 'control not just the prices of their services, but the flow of our nation's commerce and communication. These platforms play a critical role in our digital public square.'
Advancing the Rule of Law
The second principle is that antitrust law enforcement should adhere to the rule of law and respect binding precedent and the original meaning of the statutory text.
According to Slater, this principle means that:
Supporting Deregulation
The third principle is a preference for litigation over regulation.
Slater explained how anticompetitive government regulations unnecessarily sap the free markets of dynamism. Aggressive antitrust enforcement supports a competitive process that enables markets to regulate themselves, providing a bulwark against market power that often leads to regulatory intervention.
She emphasized that antitrust is a scalpel, not a sledgehammer:
'[Antitrust] imposes government obligations only on parties that violate the law, and only for the limited time necessary to restore competition. In contrast, ex ante regulations cover all parties in an industry for time immemorial, permanently distorting the free market rather than merely curing diseases that were destroying the market.'
What's more, regulation too often serves private special interests:
'Worse still, a system of anti-competitive regulation can be co-opted by monopolies and their lobbyists, such that the state's power actually amplifies, rather than diminishes, corporate power, and leads to the proliferation of government regulations that serve corporate interests rather than the people and drown out new innovations.'
Slater concluded by describing the Trump Administration's new deregulatory initiative:
'To combat against such laws and regulations that stifle rather than promote competition, we have launched the Anticompetitive Regulations Task Force. Consistent with the Trump Administration's deregulatory efforts, the Antitrust Division's Task Force will seek to identify and eliminate laws and regulations that undermine the operation of the free market and harm consumers, workers, and businesses. We look forward to working with the FTC and with partner agencies throughout the government on these efforts.'
A Forward Look
The Slater speech is a strong signal that the Trump Administration will keep pursuing aggressive antitrust enforcement, especially with respect to digital platforms, high tech, and markets that directly affect consumers' pocketbooks. Restraints that harm American labor also will get close scrutiny.
Moreover, while specifics will need to be fleshed out, it is clear that the DOJ (and, it may be presumed, the Federal Trade Commission) will feel free to rely on older established precedents in bringing cases, which will not be 'displaced' by economics.
Furthermore, the Administration will strongly prefer litigation to regulation in dealing with competitive problems.
Finally, and perhaps most significantly, the Administration will enlist the DOJ and the FTC in an effort to eliminate existing regulations that undermine competition. This deregulatory approach will, if fully implemented, go far beyond the regulatory reform initiatives of prior administrations. Given the high costs of U.S. overregulation, the success of this endeavor could confer major benefits on the American economy.
