Wu Weighs in on Executive Order on Competition

Tim Wu, President Joe Biden’s competition adviser on the National Economic Council, said “There is a growing sense that the forms of market power we see today are often different from the ones that the merger guidelines had in mind. Some mergers have gone through without a challenge, and it turned out to be anti-competitive." Updating the guidelines to meet the marketplace status quo was “in line with the thinking of a lot of scholars and critics.” Asked whether the agencies had enough resources to conduct reviews of old mergers, Wu said that both Congress and the White House “have given attention to supporting enforcement agencies.” The House is wrangling bipartisan antitrust legislation, which would bump up funding for those very agencies by hiking merger filing fees, although President Biden has not explicitly endorsed the package. And on July 12, House appropriators advanced a spending bill that matched Biden’s ask for an increase to the Department of Justice's antitrust division. Wu declined to comment on the vacancy at the DOJ antitrust division but insisted the White House was “not trying to play favorites” between DOJ and the Federal Trade Commission. (FTC Chair Lina Khan was nominated to the commission in March, while President Biden now holds the record for the longest time a modern president has gone without nominating someone for the top DOJ antitrust role.) “The DOJ and FTC are the frontline of antitrust policy,” Wu said, adding that there is a “renewed interest in administrative approaches to competition enforcement, and harnessing the rulemaking power of various agencies.”