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(Bloomberg) — To American business leaders who hoped that Donald Trump’s return to the White House would immediately usher in an era of unfettered deal-making, Andrew Ferguson seemed like a cold shower.
In early meetings with CEOs, congressional testimony and public statements, Trump’s head of the Federal Trade Commission echoed the tough-cop messaging of his controversial predecessor Lina Khan: If corporate conduct or a proposed merger would hurt Americans, he would say, “I’m taking you to court.”
The 39-year-old stood behind new Biden-era merger guidelines. He’s kept aggressive cases against Meta Platforms Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. and continued the previous administration’s investigation of Microsoft Corp.
Yet nearly six months in, a more nuanced picture is emerging. Ferguson’s FTC reached settlements in several multibillion dollar megadeals and dismissed one Biden-era lawsuit altogether. He has acknowledged harm from mergers, but eschews the language of a traditional trustbuster, saying dealmaking can be “fuel for the fires of innovation.”
What Ferguson does share with Khan is an expansive – and relatively novel – approach to the agency’s authority to police what it deems anti-competitive behavior. Like Khan, he believes that high prices aren’t the only evidence of harm to consumers, a framework that gives Ferguson a lot of latitude to use the agency’s enforcement arm to support Trump’s broader agenda.
To that end, he opened an investigation into allegations that conservative speech has been suppressed online and called out “collusion or unlawful coordination on DEI employment metrics” as a target of a task force on labor market harms. On July 9, the agency held a policy workshop to “explore unfair or deceptive practices” by doctors performing gender affirming care.
“Andrew is exactly the right person for this role at this time,” said James Burnham, a prominent conservative attorney who recently stepped down as the general counsel of the Department of Government Efficiency, and a close friend of Ferguson. “He has a strong grounding in classical conservative thought—both in general and about antitrust specifically—but isn’t a reflexive adherent of the old way.”
To critics, Ferguson is playing politics, bending the authority of his agency to Trump’s agendas. “I agree with a fair amount of what he says about antitrust, but very little of what he has done,” said Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, a Democratic commissioner at the agency from 2018 until Trump fired her in March. “He had a real opportunity to build on the bipartisan effort to reign in corporate power, but instead he’s greenlighting multi-billion dollar deals, fighting culture wars, and hollowing out the agency.”
Ferguson declined multiple requests for an interview. Bloomberg spoke with more than two dozen government officials, outside lawyers and other people who know the chairman for this story, and both friends and professional adversaries described him as a brilliant lawyer and a savvy political operator with far-reaching ambition.
His resume has the hallmarks of a candidate for a judicial appointment. Ferguson has mused privately that he could be qualified for a seat on the federal bench and possibly even the Supreme Court someday, according to people who heard the remarks and asked not to be identified because the conversations were private.
FTC spokesperson Joe Simonson said Ferguson is focused on his work at the FTC. “The only thing he hopes is that he can help deliver President Trump’s agenda, which includes a fair marketplace, lower prices, and justice for wronged American consumers,” he said.
Ferguson has seized a wide range of opportunities to align himself with the president. In a late 2024 statement supporting the FTC’s judgement on an online shoe retailer’s return policies, Ferguson included a litany of complaints about censorship of topics like the the 2020 election results, the safety of Covid-19 vaccines and other issues.
More recently, he said Trump was within his rights to fire Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya, the other Democratic commissioner at the agency. They have filed suit challenging their removal, and their case is working its way through the federal courts. Now the traditional five-member bipartisan panel is down to three Republicans, including Melissa Holyoak, who is expected to be nominated to be US Attorney for Utah. That would would leave Ferguson and Mark Meador alone on the commission.
Historically, antitrust enforcers at the FTC and at the Department of Justice have viewed themselves akin to umpires, apolitically calling balls and strikes on mergers and other corporate conduct. That began to shift at the DOJ during the first Trump administration, then gained steam at the FTC under Khan, with both agencies using their powers to further presidential priorities.
Ferguson has criticized Khan for overreaching. At the same time, he’s continuing her focus on the tech industry and on labor market abuses that, he agrees, hurt workers. He has also distanced himself from prior Republican administrations. A muscular FTC is here to stay, he reportedly said at a closed-door meeting with corporate executives this spring: “I want to be really clear about something: This isn’t the Bush administration.”
Raised in rural Virginia, Ferguson majored in history, then got his law degree, at the University of Virginia. In 2016, he went to clerk for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, a stint that he has said cemented his relationship with one of the country’s most stalwart conservatives. It also persuaded Ferguson, who is firmly pro-life and in 2022 converted to Catholicism, that the best way to overturn Roe vs. Wade was to put more like-minded judges on the federal bench.
It also funneled him quickly into roles on Capitol Hill, first with the Senate Judiciary Committee then as a top aide to former Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. He led work that focused the body’s attention on confirming Trump-picked judges, and in 2021, McConnell praised his “stunningly outsized imprint” on the judiciary. Ferguson, he said, had been “indispensable” to the Supreme Court confirmations of Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, as well as dozens of lower-court appointees.
Once Trump left office, Ferguson volunteered for Republican Glenn Youngkin’s gubernatorial campaign in Virginia. When Youngkin won, he made Ferguson solicitor general, a post that created an opportunity to collaborate with the Biden administration on the one area where they shared common ground: antitrust.
Ferguson was highly involved in the investigation and eventual lawsuit by the Justice Department and state attorneys general over the advertising business of Alphabet Inc.’s Google, which was filed in Virginia federal court. When the tech giant moved to transfer the case to New York, Ferguson personally argued in court for Virginia and the other states—and won.
Around that time, Senate leaders turned to Ferguson to join the FTC as one of its Republican commissioners. He initially hesitated to join “one of the alphabet soup agencies,” he said in a podcast with Burnham. But ultimately, he went on, he was persuaded by the agency’s growing profile and the “importance of doing real consumer protection work.”
In the minority on the commission, he found common cause with the Khan’s progressive majority on policing big tech and healthcare.
At the same time he also wrote more than 400 pages of dissents, often in opposition to Khan’s views of expansive agency power. That includes his criticism of a popular regulation to ban non-compete agreements in employment contracts, agreeing that the provisions are a problem for the labor market but saying that Khan exceeded the FTC’s scope of authority.
The rule was challenged by business groups including the US Chamber of Commerce and overturned by a federal judge late last year. The FTC has until September 8 to decide whether to continue to defend the rule.
After a tepid start to the year, deals are ticking up. Corporate leaders seem less fazed by shifting trade policies, and Ferguson’s “see you in court” rhetoric has been tempered by his willingness to make deals. He has criticized the prior administration for its refusal to negotiate settlements, saying that if his agency can resolve its issues with a proposed merger, it will “get the hell out of the way.”
His concerns, too, may also be resolved with more novel compromises. In May Ferguson launched an investigation into ad agencies, alleging that they colluded in politically motivated ad boycotts, a bugbear of conservative media and X.com owner Elon Musk in particular.
Shortly after, the FTC signed off on Omnicom Group’s $13.5 billion buyout of rival Interpublic, a tie-up that would create the world’s biggest ad agency. To secure the regulator’s approval, the two groups promised they wouldn’t engage in any such boycotts in the future, but made no economic concessions.
That deal may prove to be a template for the FTC under Ferguson. By focusing attention on the alleged ad boycotts and leaving the underlying businesses untouched, the terms appealed to the MAGA faithful and corporate interests.
The Omnicom settlement however also engendered criticism from some government officials, including Republicans, who have privately cast the settlement as a shakedown and as a violation of the First Amendment, according to people who asked not to be identified in order to speak candidly.
Simonson, the FTC spokesperson, strongly rejected both claims, saying that the agency “works for the American people” and pointing to Ferguson’s statement at the time which cited a Republican congressional investigation into coordinated conduct in the advertising industry.
Thriving in the Trump administration can be precarious business. Ferguson has on multiple occasions compared the attention of the White House to the “Eye of Sauron”— the powerful all-seeing antagonist in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, according to people who have heard him use the phrase and asked not to be identified because the conversations were private.
Simonson denies that Ferguson ever made that comment. “The Chairman enjoys a productive and positive relationship with the White House and is honored to work for President Trump,” Simonson said. White House spokesman Kush Desai said Ferguson “continues to be a champion for President Trump’s agenda of protecting American consumers, standing up for free speech against censorship, and unleashing economic growth.”
In internal agency communications, Ferguson tends to avoid the political and cultural tropes he deploys publicly, according to people who asked not to be identified because they were not authorized to speak about agency matters. Staff say he is hard-working and engaged on cases, and both critics and supporters say he is generally concerned about getting it right.
But some staff do have concerns about Ferguson’s interest in using the agency to pursue what they see as social policy. Almost 150 employees joined an anonymous statement opposing the growing body of work against gender affirming care, saying “this is not the FTC’s lane.”
At a July 9 workshop titled “The Dangers of ‘Gender-Affirming Care’ for Minors,” Ferguson said that probing doctors for misleading claims about gender care is no different than many other cases the FTC has brought in the past. “Time and time again we have enforced the FTC Act against businesses and individuals who have made claims about their health products and services that were not backed by scientific evidence,” he said.
Chad Mizelle, chief of staff at the Justice Department attended the event; later in the day, the DOJ announced subpoenas of more than 20 doctors and clinics who provide gender-related medical care for children.
Dealmaking is continuing to rise. Data compiled by Bloomberg show that M&A advisers are now on course for their best year since 2022, feeling confident about more ambitious merger activity through the rest of 2025 and into next.
The agency is navigating the uptick with a shrinking staff. In keeping with the Trump administration’s drive to reduce the government workforce, Ferguson told Congress in May that he wants to shrink the agency’s headcount to around 1,100, down 15% from the start of the year. Simonson said the cuts would return the FTC to 2021 staffing levels.
Ferguson’s remaining plans for the FTC will likely continue to mix traditional agency enforcement actions and culture war missives. How long he will head the FTC is unclear, with supporters and critics expecting him to be nominated for a judgeship before Trump’s term is up.
“Could I see him being a federal judge? Yes,” said Garrett Ventry, a Republican lobbyist and former senate staffer who worked on the Hill alongside Ferguson and considers him a close, personal friend. “Same for a big job at DOJ. He’s extremely smart and well connected. He backs the president’s agenda. This is not performative.”
Alvaro Bedoya, one of the fired Democratic FTC commissioners and a key Ferguson foil agrees – to a point. “He has a singular intellect and could be a brilliant law enforcer,” Bedoya said. That’s undermined by fealty to the administration, he said: “You can’t be a trustbuster and a culture warrior at the same time.”
–With assistance from Leah Nylen, Fareed Sahloul and Zoe Tillman.
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