The F.T.C.’s Next, More Deal-Friendly Leader

Deal makers hope that Donald Trump’s pick to run the F.T.C. will take a less aggressive approach than Lina Khan.Credit…Jose Luis Magana/Associated Press

The new Lina Khan

Donald Trump’s picks for merger enforcement is complete: The president-elect has chosen Andrew Ferguson to lead the Federal Trade Commission, making him one of the nation’s top antitrust cops — and an almost polar opposite to the agency’s current leader, Lina Khan.

The choice validates the view of corporate deal makers that a second Trump administration would be good for M.&A., after Khan challenged big takeovers to help shift antitrust case law. (More on that below.) But Ferguson shares a belief with his predecessor: the need to crack down on Big Tech.

Ferguson will almost certainly scrap Khan’s signature merger policy. The departing F.T.C. chair — along with Jonathan Kanter, the head of the Justice Department’s antitrust division — made a point of opposing far more mergers than many of her forebears. Not every case ended in victory, but legal experts said that her approach helped reshape aspects of U.S. competition law and slowed down the pace of M.&A.

That approach is likely to end under Ferguson, an F.T.C. commissioner who has objected to Khan’s activist strategy. (He’ll have the votes at the agency, with Trump having also picked Mark Meador to join as a commissioner, most likely giving Republicans a majority.) In a pitch for the agency leadership position seen by Punchbowl News, Ferguson, who doesn’t need Senate confirmation, said he would “reverse Lina Khan’s anti-business agenda.”

Wall Street has been eager for looser merger enforcement, hoping to profit from increased deal activity and other deregulation. “I am quite optimistic that this administration is going to run a very, very pro-growth agenda,” David Solomon, Goldman Sachs’s C.E.O., said on Tuesday at the Reuters NEXT conference. He added that deal volume in 2025 alone could exceed the 10-year average.

But Ferguson may follow Khan in cracking down on tech giants — in a different way. Under Khan, the agency sued the likes of Amazon and Meta, accusing them of abusing their dominant market share. As recently as last month, she reportedly signed off on a wide-ranging investigation into Microsoft over cloud computing, artificial intelligence and more.