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Donald Trump is considering naming an aggressive enforcer to lead the Department of Justice’s trustbusting team, as top Republicans set their sights on alleged anti-competitive conduct by Big Tech.
Gail Slater, a top aide to vice-president-elect JD Vance, is a leading contender to head the antitrust unit in Trump’s Department of Justice, said people familiar with the matter. She was earlier this month seen as a frontrunner to lead the Federal Trade Commission.
Slater’s nomination would signify the new administration’s support for a tough enforcement stance akin to that championed by Biden administration officials — including Jonathan Kanter, current head of the DoJ’s antitrust division, and Lina Khan, FTC chair — said top Wall Street dealmakers.
Tough antitrust enforcement, especially on Big Tech, has been embraced by a new generation of Make America Great Again populists spearheaded by Vance, who recently told the Financial Times that he wanted to see Google broken up.
Slater’s emergence as a leading contender for the DoJ antitrust unit comes amid a battle to secure Trump’s nomination to chair the FTC — and shape how aggressively it polices mergers and acquisitions.
Top contenders include Melissa Holyoak, according to people familiar with the matter. Holyoak, one of the agency’s two Republican commissioners, could favour more traditionally conservative antitrust policy which would tolerate consolidation so long as consumers are not harmed — a paradigm rejected by Khan and Kanter.
But Senator Mike Lee, a Trump ally and top Republican on a US Senate antitrust subcommittee, has also thrown his weight behind Mark Meador, a former enforcer at the DoJ and FTC. Wall Street and Big Tech executives fear he would maintain the Biden administration’s aggressive antitrust stance, which has featured high-profile legal challenges against Google, Apple, Meta and Amazon.
“The FTC desperately needs new leadership who will restore the agency to enforcement that is informed by legal precedent and economics and who will continue to hold Big Tech accountable for their anti-competitive conduct,” Lee told the Financial Times in a statement.
“I have faith that both Mark Meador and Melissa Holyoak would lead the agency in this direction,” added Lee, who next year will chair the upper chamber’s energy committee — a move that will raise his profile in the Republican party.
Andrew Ferguson, the other Republican FTC commissioner, is also in the running to head the regulator. As a current official, he would not need to be approved again by the Senate.
But his previous role as chief counsel to Mitch McConnell, the former Republican Senate leader whose relationship with president-elect Trump soured in recent years, might hurt his chances, said a person familiar with the matter.
Karoline Leavitt, a Trump transition spokesperson, said the president-elect’s “remaining decisions will continue to be announced by him when they are made”.
Ferguson in a statement said that Trump’s “decisive victory is a mandate for change” and that the Biden administration’s “regulatory assault on American businesses is over”. He said he was looking “forward to being part of the most pro-innovation, pro-competition, pro-worker, and pro-consumer administration in the history of this country”.
Holyoak and Meador declined to comment. Slater did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
People familiar with discussions said Slater remained in pole position to spearhead Trump’s antitrust activities.
“Given her position on the campaign and her relationship with JD Vance, I’m assuming that if she wants the DoJ [division] or chair of the FTC, that she would be well positioned to get it,” said one person.
An Oxford-educated lawyer who worked at the FTC for a decade, Slater was an adviser to Julie Brill, a former FTC commissioner appointed by former Democratic president Barack Obama.