Khan Job
In September 2021, three months into her now-ended tenure as chair of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Lina Khan circulated a “Vision and Priorities” memo that read less like a law-enforcement agenda than a political-economy manifesto. The agency, she declared, is “a public body whose work shapes the distribution of power and opportunity across our economy.” She outlined three priorities: confronting “rampant consolidation” through aggressive merger enforcement; cracking down on “dominant intermediaries” that “hike fees, dictate terms, and entrench their market power”; and eliminating one-sided contract terms such as noncompetes and repair restrictions.
The moment seemed tailor-made for such ambitions. The Biden administration had issued a sweeping executive order on competition, and Khan had already made a national name with her 2017 Yale Law Journal student note, “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox,” which argued that consumer-welfare antitrust could not address the real harms of concentrated corporate power. At 32, confirmed by the Senate just four years out of law school, she became the youngest chair in FTC history.
Today, much of that agenda lies in ruins. Courts have blocked or dismantled nearly every major initiative that Khan launched. Merger enforcement produced a few wins: Kroger–Albertsons, Illumina–GRAIL, and Tapestry–Capri. But those cases rested on conventional legal theories that career staff would likely have pursued under almost any chair. Khan’s signature projects—competition rulemaking, novel litigation theories, and a campaign against “dominant intermediaries”—met a different fate. Courts rejected them, or the administration quietly shelved them, damaging the FTC’s institutional credibility.