President-elect Donald Trump‘s selection of antitrust lawyer Mark Meador for a spot on the Federal Trade Commission is a sign that Trump 2.0 is leaning further into populism and a willingness to challenge the corporate world, especially Big Tech.
Meador, a Republican, has worked in both the private sector and for the federal government on antitrust policy. Not cut from the traditional Wall Street-friendly Republican mold, Meador has branded Google a “monopolist,” supports the Kids Online Safety Act that would impose new rules on tech giants, and has eschewed the GOP’s association with big business.
“I basically think that he is the clearest choice that Trump could have made that he is committed to a more populist approach to antitrust,” said Abigail Ball, executive director at American Compass, a conservative group that favors a more skeptical approach to big business.
Meador’s nomination was announced at the same time that Trump said Republican FTC Commissioner Andrew Ferguson would replace FTC Chairwoman Lina Khan at the agency.
Jennifer Huddleston, a senior fellow in technology policy at the Cato Institute, predicted that Meador would likely continue to pursue aggressive antitrust action against tech companies.
“Mark certainly has a lot of experience in antitrust and a rather aggressive approach to antitrust in the tech sector,” Huddleston told the Washington Examiner, noting that Meador served as deputy chief counsel for antitrust and competition policy to Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT).
Meador studied at the University of Chicago as an undergrad and received his law degree from the University of Houston. In addition to time working with Lee and as an attorney at the FTC, he has also worked as a trial attorney at the Justice Department’s antitrust division.
Meador is no fan of Google. He sided with the DOJ in its antitrust lawsuit against the tech giant and branded Google a “monopolist” in August when a federal judge ruled the company violated antitrust law related to its search business.
“Today a federal court has finally confirmed what every citizen has intuitively known for years: Google is a monopolist,” Meador said on X.
Meador has also said on social media that he wrote the Competition and Transparency in Digital Advertising Act, legislation introduced by Lee that would force a breakup of Google’s ad business.
Meader expressed support for the DOJ’s antitrust lawsuit against Live Nation-Ticketmaster, which would force Live Nation to sell Ticketmaster. Ahead of the lawsuit’s announcement, he called DOJ legal action a “critical step” in holding the company responsible for “anticompetitive business practices.”
“As a result of their ill-advised merger, Live Nation-Ticketmaster has eroded free market competition in the live event ticketing industry and hurt millions of fans along the way,” he said on X.
Responding to a Wall Street Journal piece about how the Republican Party and “big business” have been drifting apart, Meador simply wrote “big is bad” on X.
Khan has drawn considerable ire from industry groups and Republicans.
She 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.
However, while Meador seems to take a populist approach to antitrust and appears skeptical of the country’s largest corporations, he is still seen as much more pro-business than Khan.
William Kovacic, a former chairman of the FTC and current professor at George Washington University Law School, told the Washington Examiner that he infers from Meador’s time working for Lee that Meador shares concerns with the senator that the Khan-led FTC has exceeded its authority in some respects.
He said Meador and Ferguson might be skeptical about the FTC’s authority to promulgate competition rules and use rulemaking as a policymaking tool.
Former Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) previously served as Trump’s ambassador to New Zealand and is now chairman of the Competitiveness Coalition, a group advocating light-touch regulation and tax policies.
Scott told the Washington Examiner that he expects the FTC to return to its original mission after Khan departs and Meador joins the board. He said under Khan, the agency has strayed from its nonpolitical remit and has been “weaponized.”
Still, given her populist streak, Khan has counted some allies on the populist Right, among them Vice President-elect J.D Vance, who has even praised Khan.
Meador’s pick indicates that Trump is willing, at least in some capacity, to keep some of that populist streak alive on the FTC and that the 2.0 version of the Trump administration will trend more populist than the first.
“There are definitely other picks that he could have made that would have been a gentler transition in that direction,” Ball told the Washington Examiner. “But I think Mark is like the clearest kind of signal that he could have put out there that he is actually committed to kind of taking this approach.”
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Complementing his FTC picks, Trump has also named Gail Slater as the top antitrust enforcer at the DOJ. Slater was nominated to be assistant attorney general for the antitrust division — a powerful position in charge of all federal criminal antitrust investigations and prosecutions.
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 FTC, including as an adviser to a Democratic commissioner in former President Barack Obama’s administration.