Washington, D.C. — Every week, American families sit down to pay their bills and wonder why everything costs so much. Groceries, rent, airline tickets, home insurance. Prices keep climbing in industry after industry, and the companies charging them keep posting record profits. Today, Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon introduced the Competitive Prices Act, a bill that would give families, enforcers, and state attorneys general the tools to do something about it.

“When the entire marketplace is rigged to allow competitors to charge the same inflated price, that’s not competition. That’s coordination,” said Lee Hepner, Senior Legal Counsel at the American Economic Liberties Project. “What the law used to condemn as illegal price fixing has been supplanted by covert data exchanges and shared pricing algorithms that conceal rather than expose the root cause of higher prices and artificial shortages. The Competitive Prices Act re-establishes guardrails to prevent a culture of casual collusion. Americans shouldn’t need a smoking-gun email to prove they’re being ripped off.”

For nearly two decades, corporations have exploited a legal loophole created by the Supreme Court’s 2007 decision in Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly, which made it nearly impossible to bring a price-fixing case without direct evidence of an explicit agreement. Companies learned they could collude by sending price signals in earnings calls, or by delegating their pricing decisions to shared third party algorithms. As a result, companies create artificial shortages and raise prices in lockstep, squeezing families at the checkout counter and the gas pump without risk of liability. In the wake of Twombly, corporations are given the benefit of doubt, and cases are dismissed even where evidence would reveal an illegal cartel.

The Competitive Prices Act would amend the Sherman Act, the nation’s foundational antitrust law, to restore fair pleading standards for consumers where the Supreme Court has tilted the deck against them. Under the bill, a claim is “plausible” when a plaintiff alleges coordinated price hikes or supply constraints in the presence of specified circumstantial evidence, including irrational pricing unexplained by costs, exchanges of competitively sensitive information, price signaling, or highly concentrated markets that make coordination easier. Plaintiffs would no longer need to rule out the possibility that companies acted independently just to get in the courtroom door.

The bill empowers the DOJ, FTC, state attorneys general, and private parties to bring claims pursuant to century-old norms for enforcing against illegal price fixing, ensuring that a credible threat of enforcement facilitates up-front compliance with the law.

“This is about whether families have a fair shot, either in the marketplace itself or in court,” said Hepner. “When companies can coordinate to raise the price of putting food on your table or keeping a roof over your head, and the law says there’s nothing anyone can do about it, something is broken. This bill starts to fix it.”

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