The Trump antitrust and consumer protection regime is notable for one main achievement – fostering a record merger wave on Wall Street by either not enforcing merger law or using merger law as a mechanism to extract political favors.

Initially seen as a ‘populist’ on antitrust, President Trump appointed Gail Slater as Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust and Andrew Ferguson as the Chair of the Federal Trade Commission. Slater has since been fired, and Ferguson has done very little. During a record merger wave, the Antitrust Division under Slater hasn’t blocked a single deal, and the FTC under Ferguson has challenged just three combinations, each valued under a billion dollars. The Trump administration placed Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Russell Vought as the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, with predictable results: the near-collapse of the agency.

Slater continued certain monopolization cases, but was pushed out in an ugly feud over corporate lobbying. Ferguson betrayed small business and consumers by dropping a key case against Pepsi over its work with Walmart to inflate grocery prices. He seemingly engineered a favor for Elon Musk by imposing illegal censorship requirements on an advertising agency merger. And his governing choices are not transparent, not only because President Trump fired both Democratic commissioners without cause, but also because Ferguson has not held any public meetings.

This fact sheet lays out the track record of the DOJ, FTC, and CFPB – three agencies that are at the front lines of regulating our system of commerce. At a time when economic anxieties are high, and the wealthy live very different lives than average Americans, whether these leaders faithfully enforce the law for the public or for the most powerful corporations matters more than ever. As noted below, there have been some successes on the consumer protection front, a continuation of a number of major Biden-era FTC and DOJ lawsuits, and announcements of potentially useful investigations. But largely, the theme from Ferguson, Slater, and Vought is that the federal government is not looking out for consumers or workers, and has instead morphed antitrust and consumer protection into a means for cronyism.