Under Kanter and Khan, the DOJ and FTC have also filed far more ambitious antitrust investigations than any administration in decades. Last summer, an investigation into several food production conglomerates over wage suppression and collusion resulted in an $85 million settlement, one of several successful DOJ investigations into no-poach and wage-fixing schemes across the economy. In December, the FTC successfully blocked the medical data firm IQVIA’s attempt to monopolize the business of advertising to doctors through the purchase of an ad tech company called DeepIntent. And in January, a judge sided with the DOJ in its suit against a JetBlue-Spirit merger, the first successful prosecution of an airline merger in 40 years.

The effect of a more aggressive posture from regulators goes beyond favorable court rulings: Under the threat of litigation, Amazon, Lockheed Martin, Berkshire Hathaway, and the chipmaker Nvidia were some of the companies to back off multibillion-dollar acquisitions of smaller firms. Biden’s regulators filed a record 50 antitrust enforcement actions last year, and mergers dropped to a 10-year low.

Trump’s regulators, like all administrations of the past 40 years before Biden, argued cases mainly on the narrow basis of harms to consumers. But Khan and other reformers argue for reestablishing an interpretation of antitrust law that’s more expansive than this “consumer welfare standard.” Under Biden, regulators have rewritten the government’s lax merger guidelines and have often focused their legal strategy on the harms done to producers as well as consumers. For example, in October 2022, regulators secured one of the most important victories of the Biden era with a successful challenge to a merger between Simon & Schuster and Penguin Random House, which would have cut the number of major publishers in the U.S. from five to four. Prosecutors focused their arguments on how the industry’s consolidation hurts authors, not consumers; by winning with that argument, they established the precedent that antitrust cases can be won by proving harm to both workers and independent contractors.

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