President-elect Donald Trump has named Gail Slater as the top antitrust enforcer at the Justice Department, signaling plans for a continued clash against the biggest tech companies.
Slater, a native of Ireland who attended the University of Oxford and got her law degree from University College Dublin, was nominated to be assistant attorney general for the antitrust division — a powerful position in charge of all federal criminal antitrust investigations and prosecutions.
“Big Tech has run wild for years, stifling competition in our most innovative sector and, as we all know, using its market power to crack down on the rights of so many Americans, as well as those of Little Tech!” Trump said on social media. “I was proud to fight these abuses in my First Term, and our Department of Justice’s antitrust team will continue that work under Gail’s leadership.”
Slater immigrated to the United States from Ireland and is a dual citizen. Since February, she has served as an economic policy adviser for Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), now the vice president-elect. She has also advised Trump’s transition team on antitrust matters.
Vance is known as one of the most populist members of the Senate. Trump’s pick of Vance as his running mate further accentuates the populist shift in the party in terms of economic policy. While Republicans are typically averse to organized labor, Vance last year visited a picket line of striking autoworkers.
Vance has also praised President Joe Biden’s Federal Trade Commission chairwoman, Lina Khan, who has faced opposition from conservatives in the party. Khan is a critic of big companies and a proponent of “hipster antitrust” — a school of thought that abandons the consumer welfare standard that guided U.S. antitrust policy for decades in favor of a much more adversarial approach to business that also considers other factors, such as corporate concentration and income inequality, in assessing anticompetitive practices.
Slater served as a senior tech policy adviser on Trump’s first-term National Economic Council. Earlier in her career, she worked for a decade at the Federal Trade Commission, including as an adviser to a Democratic commissioner in former President Barack Obama’s administration.
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Slater has also worked in the tech world herself, spending some time during the Biden administration as a vice president at Roku. She was also a senior vice president at Fox Corporation from 2019 to 2022.
If confirmed, Slater will replace Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust Jonathan Kanter, who has been the top antitrust cop since 2021 and has brought a record number of monopolization cases in the role, according to BNN Bloomberg.