President Biden’s antitrust adviser Tim Wu is leaving the White House

Tim Wu, the White House adviser helping to drive the administration’s push to rein in corporate giants with tougher antitrust enforcement is planning to leave his position in the coming months. Wu is expected to return to teaching at Columbia Law School after a roughly year-and-a-half as special assistant to President Biden for technology and competition policy. Wu was part of a trio of antitrust hawks President Joe Biden installed in 2021 as part of a push to curb the power of sprawling companies — a fight that has focused in particular on tech titans like Amazon and Google. It’s unclear what Wu’s departure means for the Biden administration’s antitrust strategy, but it does mean one of the key drivers of Biden’s antitrust strategy won’t be there to push for those changes anymore. From his position on the National Economic Council, Wu was a primary architect of Biden’s wide-ranging executive order from July 2021 designed to boost competition throughout the economy. The executive order included 72 initiatives targeting a range of industries including technology, transportation, health care and agriculture.