Biden revitalized DOJ and FTC capabilities---ensures monopoly crackdown.

And it’s not just merger cases. The agency announced its intention to more aggressively enforce the Clayton Act’s prohibition on directors serving simultaneously on the boards of competitors, leading to the resignation of board directors in several industries. “The DOJ making this a priority is a big step and consistent with the broader theme of reviving dormant legal powers,” Sandeep Vaheesan of the Open Markets Institute (OMI) said. During Obama’s first term, the USDA unsuccessfully tried to challenge the poultry industry’s abusive “tournament system,” which pits chicken farmers against each other to compete for bids and undercuts their bargaining power. But last summer, a DOJ lawsuit against the food production conglomerate Cargill, several competitors, and a data consulting firm alleging years of collusion and wage suppression ended in an $85 million settlement, effectively ending the practice across much of the industry.

Kanter has also initiated a half-dozen criminal investigations against no-poach and wage-fixing agreements, which illegally block workers from changing jobs in their industry. In October 2022, the DOJ won the first-ever conviction under antitrust law for employer collusion when the staffing firm VDA pleaded guilty to a conspiracy with another firm to refrain from recruiting or hiring each other’s nurses. Several other cases have ended in acquittals, but as with lawsuits against mergers, the message is being heard in the business world: Antitrust enforcers are taking labor violations seriously again.

More than just litigating antitrust cases, Biden’s administration has reoriented the entire government toward making the economy fairer and more competitive. Biden’s policy program is designed to check monopoly and restructure competition in labor and other markets to public purposes.

The FTC likewise has filed far more ambitious antitrust lawsuits than it did under previous administrations. Khan has said that to win, the government must be willing to lose, eschewing the extreme caution of her predecessors. But there’s been less losing than media coverage would lead you to believe. Khan’s two oft-referenced defeats in court—the failed lawsuits against Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision and Meta’s acquisition of Within—are in fact the FTC’s only clear losses. The agency has secured important wins in court, including a recent ruling against Intuit for falsely advertising its signature product, TurboTax, as free. The FTC has also extracted settlements that prevent abusive business practices, such as one with the health information technology company Surescripts that prohibits the firm from excluding competitors from e-prescribing markets. And many cases have concluded in companies dropping a merger after being sued by the FTC. Under the threat of litigation, the computer chip maker Nvidia called off its $40 billion acquisition of the chip design firm Arm; Lockheed Martin dropped its $4.4 billion purchase of the engine maker Aerojet Rocketdyne; and Berkshire Hathaway called off its $1.7 billion purchase of a pipeline in Utah, to name a few.