Binyamin Appelbaum

A nascent effort by the Obama administration to limit corporate consolidation, begun after officials concluded that a lack of competition was hurting the American economy, appears to be coming to an abrupt end as the Trump administration takes charge.

President-elect Donald J. Trump railed against media company mergers on the campaign trail, promising to block the proposed combination of AT&T and Time Warner, but conservatives and liberals alike say they see no evidence President-elect Trump will be worried about the continuing rise of megacompanies in other parts of the economy once he takes office. “So far the pattern seems to be a pretty traditional deregulatory agenda, which is at odds with the campaign but not at odds with the Republican Party,” said K. Sabeel Rahman, a law professor at Brooklyn Law School who writes about antitrust issues. “So I’m pretty skeptical that there will be an aggressive push on these issues.”