HJC report raises concerns about FTC commitment to consumers
Drawing on the words of experienced Federal Trade Commission staff, the House Judiciary Committee’s (HJC) interim staff report, “Abuse of Power, Waste of Resources, and Fear,” details multiple hurdles to the agency’s success in recent years:
Political priorities are distracting from the FTC’s historical focus on consumers.
1. Staff worry that legally dubious cases take focus away from actually protecting consumers. According to the report, “Career FTC staff members expressed concern that Chair Khan did not want the FTC to be successful… and even brought losing cases on purpose,” to prod legislative action.
– Plainly stated, one manager wrote to another manager that “I’m not sure being successful (or doing things well) is a shared goal, as the chair wants to show that we can’t meet our mission mandate without legislative change. I also continue to get a sense that outside influences . . . have an undue impact on our priorities, investigation management, and enforcement decisions. While public perception of the Commission’s performance is vital to institutional legitimacy and I recognize the need to explain to the public what we’re doing (or more accurately, what we’ve done), we should never make an enforcement-related decision for the sake of PR.”
2. Career staff report that their institutional knowledge and experiences aren’t being taken into account, creating enforcement vulnerabilities for the agency. “Not listening to staff… created errors that risked the integrity of FTC investigations.”
– Former Commissioners Wilson and Phillips noted that one of the omnibus resolutions resembled a hastily adopted resolution on the same topic from a year earlier. “The language of the resolution pushed through by Chair Khan to grab power informed recipients of a subpoena to the existence of a merger review filing, which is information the FTC must keep confidential under federal law. If Chair Khan accounted for staff feedback and did not rush through the poorly drafted resolutions, errors like this could have been avoided.”