# Andrew Ferguson **Andrew N. Ferguson** has chaired the [[FTC]] since January 20, 2025. He is the answer to the question the [[Lina Khan]] page poses — what does the right do with the neo-Brandeisian toolkit once it holds the agency — and the answer is: keep the cases, keep the merger guidelines, drop the rules, and change the stated reason from corporate power to platform censorship. ## Background Clerk to Judge Karen Henderson on the D.C. Circuit and to Justice Clarence Thomas (2016–17); antitrust practice at Covington, Bancroft and Sidley; then the Senate Judiciary Committee — chief counsel for nominations to Lindsey Graham, senior special counsel to [[Chuck Grassley]], and chief counsel to [[Mitch McConnell]] (2019–21), which put him inside the judicial-confirmation machine the [[Confirmation Pipeline]] page describes. Virginia solicitor general from January 2022 under Jason Miyares. Nominated to the commission's Republican seat by Biden in July 2023 and confirmed by voice vote on March 7, 2024; designated chairman by Trump without a further vote. ## What he kept and what he dropped - **Kept the 2023 [[Merger Guidelines]]** — confirmed on February 18, 2025, on institutional grounds ("constant turnover undermines agency credibility"), with DOJ concurring. The clearest continuity between the two eras. - **Kept the platform cases.** Tried and lost [[FTC v. Meta]] (judgment for Meta November 17, 2025, on appeal since January 2026); pressed [[FTC v. Amazon]] toward its March 29, 2027 bench trial. In June 2026 he argued to MLex that courts need standing case-management orders to move antitrust cases faster, because "dominant firms win" by delay. - **Dropped the rules.** On September 5, 2025 the commission voted 3–1 to abandon its appeals in *Ryan v. FTC* and accept vacatur of the Khan-era [[Non-Compete Agreement]] ban ([[Rebecca Slaughter]] dissenting), substituting case-by-case enforcement. - **Added a censorship docket.** Inquiries into platform content moderation and advertiser boycotts, including of [[Media Matters for America]], reframe the Big Tech problem as one of speech rather than price — the populist-right theory of harm the [[Consumer Welfare Standard]] cannot express and the [[New Brandeis Movement]] never adopted. - **Presided over the end of the independent commission.** He supported the March 2025 firing of the two Democratic commissioners that became [[Trump v. Slaughter]]; the agency he chairs is now removable-at-will by the President, which makes every item above a presidential choice rather than an agency one. In 2026 he also opened an industry-wide investigation of nitrogen-fertilizer producers (announced May 28, 2026) and requested a $426.7M FY2027 budget, up $43M. ## The $277 fraud defense (August 2026) In August 2026 Ferguson amplified a defense, written by his own FTC public-affairs director (and part-time White House detailee) [[Joe Simonson]], of the federal prosecution in [[United States v. Soriano]] — a [[SNAP]] trafficking case with charged conduct of $277 — framing it as evidence of a commitment to prosecuting "all fraud." The episode is notable for who made it. Ferguson chairs the [[FTC]], the agency whose own antitrust suit against [[John Deere]] was pending while Deere contributed six figures to [[USDA Secretary's Priorities Fund]]. An FTC chairman defending the allocation of federal enforcement resources toward $277 benefit cases, at a moment when white-collar prosecution sat at a modern low, is itself a data point in [[Fraud Enforcement Inversion]]. ## See Also - [[FTC]] · [[Lina Khan]] · [[Trump v. Slaughter]] - [[Merger Guidelines]] · [[Consumer Welfare Standard]] · [[New Brandeis Movement]] - [[FTC v. Meta]] · [[FTC v. Amazon]] · [[Non-Compete Agreement]] - [[Fraud Enforcement Inversion]] · [[United States v. Soriano]] - [[NewsGuard]] — the 2025 FTC investigative demand, withdrawn April 2026