Donald Trump Appoints Andrew Ferguson As Next Chair Of Federal Trade Commission

UPDATED: Donald Trump on Tuesday appointed Andrew Ferguson to serve as the next chair of the Federal Trade Commission, which has a major say over mergers and acquisitions.

The president-elect signaled that Ferguson would take on big tech, as his pick has previously suggested that major platforms may be “cartels” that have suppressed conservative voices and should even be broken up.

“Andrew has a proven record of standing up to Big Tech censorship, and protecting Freedom of Speech in our Great Country,” Trump wrote on Truth Social this afternoon.

That said, as major media companies eye consolidation, Ferguson has signaled that he will be more lenient that Lina Khan, the FTC chair under President Joe Biden. Punchbowl News last week reported on a pitch made to Trump’s team for Ferguson, and it included the argument that he would stop Khan’s “war on mergers.”

Ferguson has been a commissioner on the FTC since April, so he does not have to be confirmed in the Senate.

He previously served as solicitor general in Virginia, and was a litigator for antitrust at several D.C. law firms.

“Andrew will be the most America First, and pro-innovation FTC Chair in our Country’s History,” Trump wrote.

Trump also nominated Mark Meador, a partner at a partner at Kressin Meador Powers LLC, to serve as a commissioner at the FTC. Meador was deputy chief counsel for antitrust and competition policy for Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary antitrust subcommittee. Meador will require Senate confirmation.

During Khan’s tenure, she has aggressively challenged some major mergers and industry concentration. Earlier today, a federal judge sided with the FTC in blocking the merger of grocery giants Kroger and Safeway.

Ferguson’s pitch for the job, per Punchbowl News, included that he would “protect freedom of speech and fight wokeness” and that he would “fight back against the trans agenda.”

Following his selection, the two Democrats on the FTC, Alvaro Bedoya and Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, wrote in a letter to Ferguson that the pitch to Trump “raises questions” about his priorities.

“The document does propose allowing more mergers, firing civil servants and fighting something called the ‘trans agenda.’ Is all of that more important than the cost of healthcare and groceries and gasoline? Or fighting fraud?”

Earlier this month, Trump nominated Gail Slater to serve as chief of the Justice Department’s antitrust division, a signal that his administration would continue the Biden administration efforts to rein in big tech. In November, he tapped FCC commissioner Brendan Carr to chair that agency.

Carr also has targeted big tech with similar claims that they have censored voices on the right in content moderation. Like Carr, Ferguson has singled out one company in particular, NewsGuard, which rates the trustworthiness of news outlets. In a statement last week, Ferguson argued that a NewsGuard poor rating can “choke off advertising dollars that are the life-blood for many websites.”

“NewsGuard is, of course, free to rate websites by whatever metric it wants. But the antitrust laws do not permit third parties to facilitate group boycotts among competitors,” Ferguson said.

But as much as Carr and Ferguson have positioned themselves as champions of free speech, their attacks on NewsGuard raise First Amendment concerns.

Last month, NewsGuard pushed back on Carr’s attacks that it favored censorship, given the low score it had given to right-wing site Newsmax.

NewsGuard said that “our journalism is itself speech protected by the First Amendment, and we’re concerned to see a government official using the powers of his office, however unwittingly, to rely on false claims, to benefit the very publishers who make the false claims, such as Newsmax.”