Many people disappear for a while when they leave top government jobs. They settle into the private sector or retreat into family life.
Not Lina Khan.
Ms. Khan, the former chair of the Federal Trade Commission, recently campaigned for the New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, appearing at his victory party in June after he won the Democratic primary. She has become a frequent podcast guest, talking about the virtues of corporate regulation and vigorous law enforcement against monopolies. This month, she returned to teaching at Columbia Law School, where 180 students have signed up for her antitrust class.
Her new mission: Ensure the survival of her brand of economic populism, which blames the power and greed of corporations for many of the nation’s ills.
As chair of the F.T.C. under former President Joseph R. Biden Jr., Ms. Khan accused Amazon of breaking antimonopoly laws and sued to block mergers across the economy. Now, she is making the case that Democrats should continue that approach after a wipeout defeat in the last election.
“As part of some of this self-reflection, it seems like some people are like, ‘Well, if only we hadn’t gone after corporate lawbreakers because they were donors to our side,’” Ms. Khan, 36, said in a July interview. “It’s extraordinarily dangerous and disturbing to suggest that the right path for us is to shy away from bringing lawsuits when firms are violating the law, in ways that hurt people, because they’re friendly with certain parts of our party.”
Ms. Khan’s allies and critics have engaged in speculation about her future plans. Recently, she was among the Democrats rumored to be a possible candidate for the New York congressional seat being vacated by the retiring Representative Jerrold Nadler. Ms. Khan quickly shot the idea down.
But her activism has kept her at the center of a fraught debate about how the Democratic Party can find a winning message after President Trump’s election to a second term.
When Mr. Biden’s administration — with Ms. Khan’s help — sued the biggest companies and created new corporate regulations, it drove a rift between Democrats and many in the powerful tech industry. Some Democrats have called for the party to pull back on criticism of the wealthy and enact policies to improve the economy that would also be more palatable to the business world. Ms. Khan, alongside allies like Mr. Mamdani and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, has doubled down on her support of limits on powerful corporations.
“It’s a time for healthy intraparty debate, and it seems like that’s happening in all sorts of corners,” Ms. Khan said this month during a podcast interview with The Bulwark, a center-right publication.
Ms. Khan’s career took off at Yale Law School when she published her paper titled “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox.” After graduation, she went to work for a Democratic commissioner on the Federal Trade Commission. Next, she joined the staff of a congressional committee investigating the tech giants, producing a report about how companies abused their power.
While leading the F.T.C., Ms. Khan hit early snags in her efforts to take the agency in a more aggressive direction. She struggled to win over longstanding career staff. Lawsuits to block acquisitions by Meta and Microsoft fell apart in court.
She had more success as her tenure progressed. Alongside her lawsuit against Amazon, the agency blocked Kroger’s purchase of Albertsons, which it said would create a grocery colossus, and the combination of two large fashion companies.
Her work won fans and critics. Last year, billionaires including Reid Hoffman, Barry Diller and Mark Cuban urged then Vice President Kamala Harris to remove Ms. Khan after the election. Elon Musk, then a major supporter of Mr. Trump, posted on his social media site X that Ms. Khan “will be fired soon.”
She also received some unlikely plaudits, including from now Vice President JD Vance, who last year said he supported her aggressive stance on antitrust action against Big Tech.
Mr. Trump replaced her in January. Ms. Khan, who spent the Biden administration commuting between New York and Washington, settled full time in Manhattan, where she lives with her toddler and husband and spends time exploring the city’s playgrounds.
“There is a hierarchy, but there’s good competition in New York for splash pads,” she said.
In June, Ms. Khan appeared at an event in the West Village with Mr. Mamdani and Zephyr Teachout, a Fordham Law School professor who also argues for more aggressive antitrust enforcement. (Ms. Teachout also contributes to The New York Times’s Opinion section.)
At Mr. Mamdani’s primary victory party, several of his supporters took selfies with her. She continues to engage with his team when it asks for feedback or ideas, she said this summer. In late July, Ms. Khan wrote an opinion essay for The Times praising the mayoral candidate’s support of small businesses, which she called a critical piece of the U.S. economy.
“The opportunity is ripe,” she wrote, adding that Mr. Trump’s tariffs could do substantial harm to the sector. “If Democrats take it up in earnest, it could both make small business part of a winning coalition and deliver an economy that is stronger and fairer.”
Ms. Khan’s recent media tour includes stops at the sort of nontraditional outlets that Democrats hope will help win back young men who voted for Mr. Trump.
In mid-July, for example, Ms. Khan spoke with the hosts of “Lemonade Stand,” a new podcast focused on the world of business.
The show is hosted by Aidan McCaig, Douglas Wreden and Brandon Ewing, three independent creators who stream games on Twitch. They pressed Ms. Khan on criticism that her antitrust efforts in Washington hurt start-ups because it became harder for them to sell their businesses to bigger companies.
“The interest in what is good for founders and start-ups is not necessarily what’s also good for Big Tech,” she said.
In June, Ms. Khan spoke about her F.T.C. tenure on “Pablo Torre Finds Out,” a sports podcast, with listeners who skew young, male and flexible in their political views.
“I think it’s impossible to do an appearance like the one she did on my show and divorce it from the larger conversation about what should the left be doing when it comes to defining what populism actually entails,” Mr. Torre said in an interview. (Mr. Torre’s podcast is part of a network run by The Athletic, a sports news site owned by The New York Times Company.)
That debate has become more pitched in recent months. In June, Senator Elissa Slotkin, Democrat of Michigan, said the party too often had “the habit of vilifying success” in business. Others argue the party would be better served by focusing on building more housing and ambitious public projects, even if that means pulling back on regulations like environmental review laws.
Antitrust policy is important, but it “just isn’t a tool for addressing every possible concern about the direction of society,” Matt Yglesias, the liberal writer viewed as influential within the Biden administration, wrote in June.
Ms. Khan and her allies are “clearly very active both defending her record and trying to ensure that the lesson Democrats take from the 2024 election is that Democrats did not lose because of the F.T.C.,” said Nu Wexler, a former Democratic political aide who went on to work for tech companies including Google and Facebook.
For now, Ms. Khan’s main perch will be at Columbia. She has privately discussed creating a research center at the institution, according to two people with knowledge of her plans.
“It was a great honor to get to lead the F.T.C. and I really admire people who run for office and are elected officials, but it’s not something I’m going to pursue,” she said in the interview.
Ms. Khan instead said she was “figuring out what is the best role that lets me fully lean into pursuing” the subset of issues she was focused on — the effects of corporate consolidation.
Experts and allies said she had options.
Bill Kovacic, who led the F.T.C. from 2008 to 2009, said he had advised Ms. Khan to end her tenure by laying out her ideological vision and record.
“If you want that to stick, you’ve got to keep repeating that message over time,” he said, adding that Ms. Khan could return to government or get appointed as a judge. “I see her doing that.”