5 New FTC Landing Team Members Under Trump Have Antitrust, Financial, SEC Expertise
The transition team for President-elect Donald Trump named five more individuals to the FTC landing team, most of whom have expertise in antitrust, competition and other financial issues. Several observers told us Tuesday they think the commission under the incoming administration will take a more harms-based approach. Meanwhile, former FTC Commissioner Joshua Wright met with Trump over the weekend in New York, spokesman Sean Spicer told reporters on a conference call Tuesday. Spicer didn't specify the substance of the discussion and Wright declined to comment.
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Among the FTC landing team members is Paul Atkins, Patomak Global Partners CEO, who was SEC commissioner from July 2002 to August 2008 and on the staffs of two former SEC chairmen in the early 1990s, according to his company's profile. Atkins also is on other landing teams including the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. Davis Polk attorney Jeffrey Dinwoodie is another landing team member who was an SEC attorney from 2008 to 2011, said his law firm's profile. Another member is Latham & Watkins attorney Abbott (Tad) Lipsky, who was DOJ deputy assistant attorney general from 1981 to 1983 during the Reagan administration and was Coca-Cola's chief antitrust lawyer for a decade, said his firm's profile. None commented.
Robert Barker, who runs his own law firm based in the Atlanta area, confirmed he's a member of the FTC landing team, but declined to comment further. His LinkedIn profile outlines experience in "international business, corporate finance, start-up ventures and securities laws, mergers and acquisitions, and corporate governance." Chelsea Pizzola, who most recently was a research fellow at the Boston-based research organization Committee on Capital Markets Regulation (CCMR), also is listed with the FTC transition and is on other landing teams, including the Export-Import Bank, National Credit Union Administration and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. CCMR said she no longer works there and provided no other details. In November, the transition team named R Street Institute fellow Alex Pollock, who declined to comment Tuesday (see 1611290040). Wright is also apparently helping with the FTC transition though he's not listed on agency landing team website.
NetChoice Senior Policy Counsel Carl Szabo said, with the expertise of the FTC landing team skewed toward antitrust and financial issues, the agency may return to its roots. "It’s important to remember that the [FTC] was originally created to address anticompetitive activities," he said. "What I would hope is that reviews under the FTC/DOJ merger guidelines are reviewed fairly and that we do at the same time recognize benefits to consumers through certain types of mergers that allow lower prices and greater efficiency through economies of scale.”
TechFreedom President Berin Szoka said "it's not remotely surprising" that antitrust and financial experts have been named to the landing team. He said the "Republican bench is not deep" in consumer protection because that area doesn't attract free marketers. He said "there will be no shortage of people who think about competition law who are itching to be commissioners, chairman, director of the Bureau of Competition, the Bureau of Economics. Those jobs are not hard to staff in a Republican administration. The problem is getting people who are really thoughtful about the Bureau of Consumer Protection" and how to change the bureau's approach to privacy, data security and other technology cases. Consumer protection could be shortchanged in the incoming administration, he said.
Ryan Hagemann, Niskanen Center technology and civil liberties policy analyst, emailed that he guessed "antitrust reviews would get stronger for some industries and weaker for others. As far as I know, however, the FTC's framework applies antitrust reviews equally across industries (though at the same time, institutional politics and priorities are often the primary driver of these decisions)." But he said a plan is underway at the FCC to relinquish its consumer protection and competition authority to the FTC, which he generally called a "good thing" despite a lack of specifics.
Hagemann said many people "in-the-know suspect" Commissioner Maureen Ohlhausen is the odds-on favorite to lead the FTC, which he viewed as a "great move." She's "a stalwart proponent of regulatory humility and forbearance, especially as it concerns new emerging technologies that regulators are ill-equipped to regulate in an ex ante fashion," said Hagemann. "If she does take the gavel, and the FCC cedes some of its authority to the FTC, I think that will mean positive things for innovation and technological deployment in the near-term." Politico reported Tuesday that Trump is considering Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes (R) as the FTC's next chairman.
Szabo said he's "cautiously optimistic" about FTC direction under a Trump administration, which is a shift from a "rulemaking through regulation ... to a harms-based approach." He said he would like to see a reallocation of FTC resources that addresses consumers' top concerns such as identity theft (see 1603010024) rather than the pursuit of theoretical harms. He said a Republican FTC would likely institute changes sought last year by the House Commerce Committee, which advanced a bill that would have significantly changed how the commission investigates and enforces violations. The bill never got a floor vote (see 1607140051).