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Trump wants to axe rules affecting business competition

As the FTC and DOJ work to assess what rules to cut, lawmakers disagree on how deregulation will affect U.S. markets.

Makenzie Holland
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Published: 24 Jun 2025

Lawmakers are divided on the benefits of rules and regulations for promoting business competition in the U.S., which President Donald Trump has ordered federal agencies to assess.

Trump issued an executive order in April mandating federal agencies including the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), to compile a list of regulations that should be rescinded or modified due to their anticompetitive effect on U.S. business competition. Trump said in the order that certain regulations "exclude new market entrants," reducing business competition and innovation.

Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) said federal regulations intended to protect the American public often have unintended consequences by securing the position of market incumbents and insulating small and medium-sized businesses from market competition. Lee spoke during a hearing on Tuesday held by the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights.

"When regulations require expensive compliance costs that only large incumbents have the meaningful ability to comply with while remaining competitive, regulations become monopoly moats rather than consumer protections," Lee said during the hearing.

However, Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) argued that deregulation will instead undermine business competition in the U.S. He said supporting antitrust enforcement agencies like the FTC and DOJ will better protect new market entrants and hold large companies accountable for anticompetitive practices.

"It is decades of de facto deregulation during which enforcers neglected to block anticompetitive mergers and challenge monopolies that has got ourselves to a situation today where we have such concentrated markets," he said during the hearing.

Agencies testify on assessing regulations

The FTC and DOJ are both actively assessing rules and regulations to comply with Trump's executive order. The agencies issued requests for information earlier this year, seeking the public's input on how regulations affect market competition.

"The FTC will continue to carry out its review of anticompetitive regulations in order to better promote competition in American markets," FTC Commissioner Mark Meador said during the hearing.

Meador cited tech firms' requests for regulation as an example of the concerns Trump outlined in his executive order. Meador said large tech vendors can afford regulatory compliance costs while small businesses often can’t.

"When powerful companies ask for regulation, what they are often really asking for is entrenchment of their own monopoly power," he said.

Meador said the alternative to regulation is strong agency enforcement of consumer protection laws when companies harm consumers and antitrust laws when companies engage in anticompetitive conduct.

Indeed, Roger Alford, principal deputy assistant attorney general for the DOJ's antitrust division, testified that the agencies are law enforcers, not regulators.

He said the DOJ has created an anticompetitive regulation task force to carry out Trump's order and prepare a consolidated list for the administration of anticompetitive regulations.

"Large companies -- big agriculture, big tech, big pharma -- can raise barriers to entry and accessibility to the market for small to medium-sized companies," he said. The DOJ's focus has been on trying to "undo some of the anticompetitive regulations" that helped cause those barriers, he added.

Doha Mekki, a senior fellow at UC Berkeley School of Law's Center for Consumer Law and Economic Justice, urged the FTC and DOJ to stay focused on "the most challenging competition problems" rather than divert resources to deregulatory projects. Mekki served in the DOJ's antitrust division during Trump's first administration and former President Joe Biden's administration.

Mekki testified that insufficient enforcement is "at least as responsible for markets hobbled by abusive monopolies and conspiracies as anticompetitive regulation."

"Diverting enforcement dollars comes at a serious opportunity cost," she said. "It distracts from the essential core of their missions -- antitrust enforcement against illegal mergers, monopolies, conspiracies and cartels."

Makenzie Holland is a senior news writer covering big tech and federal regulation. Prior to joining Informa TechTarget, she was a general assignment reporter for the Wilmington StarNews and a crime and education reporter at the Wabash Plain Dealer.

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