A peculiar political alignment has occurred as the Federal Trade Commission presses a vigorous agenda of competition oversight and consumer protection: Some of President Joe Biden’s fiercest critics in Congress find common ground with the law professor he tapped to run the agency.

JD Vance, the former venture capitalist and Republican senator running for vice president, is one of FTC Chair Lina Khan’s supporters — a stance that’s thrown an unknown policy variable into Donald Trump’s campaign.

“I look at Lina Kahn as one of the few people in the Biden administration that I actually think is doing a pretty good job and that sort of sets me apart from most of my Republican colleagues,” Vance said at a February policy conference co-sponsored by Y Combinator and Bloomberg’s venture capital fund.

His position — and the distance it strays from the view of many Republicans in Congress — is causing consternation among some conservatives concerned that a second Trump administration could maintain a Khan-like approach at the FTC due to Vance.

“Trump’s running mate has embraced Biden’s most lawless regulator,” the Wall Street Journal editorial page wrote in a July 19 editorial that excoriated Khan and the FTC’s reasoning in various cases her agency has lost in federal court.

Trump’s FTC?

Amid this regulatory debate, there’s a pertinent question for business executives and their legal teams: How would the FTC operate under a second Trump administration? 

It’s not entirely clear, given the philosophical harmony between Khan, a Columbia University law professor, and some hard-right Republicans in addition to Vance. 

“It does sort of reflect that there is a shift and it’s not that all of a sudden Lina Khan becomes a patron saint but it is a shift that says we have to have an American economy that works for everyone and not just the elites,” said Adam Candeub, a law professor at Michigan State University. Candeub wrote the FTC policy section in the Heritage Foundation’s controversial Project 2025 “Mandate for Leadership,” which has become a political issue in the presidential campaign.

Khan’s seven-year term began in 2021, although the agency chair typically resigns if an administration changes political party. By law, only three members of the five-person commission can belong to the same political party.

This simpatico relationship between Khan and some Congressional conservatives – which led to “Khanservative” appearing in a Wall Street Journal headline – was born partly from a shared view of freedom and personal liberty. 

Khan, for example, has periodically linked monarchy with corporate autocracy, noting that as America shed a monarch government at its founding, Americans likewise don’t want to subject themselves to unchecked business overlords controlling their economic lives.

“As the Republican Party becomes more working class, we’re less captive to the neolibertarian view that everything big business does to people is OK,” Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz told the Journal in March. Gaetz, along with Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, has also publicly supported Khan’s muscular approach toward competition regulation.

Many conservatives riding with Khan have also become disenchanted with large business owing to various corporate ESG and DEI initiatives, sparking a wave of backlash, with the pejorative term “woke” cast against companies from Anheuser-Busch to the Hershey Company to Walt Disney.

They also agree with the FTC majority view that antitrust regulation has been conducted too narrowly for decades, aligned primarily on financial injury. “I think the one thing I appreciate about Lina Khan’s approach is that she recognized there has to be sort of a broader understanding of how we think about competition in the marketplace,” Vance said at the February conference in Washington D.C.

Republican tension

This ideological tension also showed up in the 922-page Project 2025 policy outline of how Trump should reshape the federal government if he’s re-elected. 

The document’s FTC section notes that “recently” conservatives’ views have diverged on the precise role of antitrust regulation and that “many in the conservative movement have taken a broader view of antitrust.”

“Conservatives cannot be blind to certain developments in the American economy that appear to make government–private sector collusion more likely, threaten vital democratic institutions, such as free speech, and threaten the happiness and mental well-being of many Americans, particularly children,” the policy document says. 

The section concludes that “many, but not all, conservatives believe that these developments may warrant the FTC’s making a careful recalibration of certain aspects of antitrust and consumer protection law and enforcement.”

Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025 and on July 30, the conservative organization said that Paul Dans, director of the 2025 Presidential Transition Project and a former Trump administration official, was stepping down from that position and that the project’s work would conclude. 

Big tech battles

A year ago, antitrust regulators at the FTC and Department of Justice stoked further concerns among businesses with new guidelines on how it would review corporate mergers, adopting an expansive view of how proposed consolidation could stifle competition or create monopolies.

The FTC’s litigation record under Khan, to be sure, has been mixed. 

The agency’s rule banning noncompete agreements generated immediate fire from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other business groups. Two federal courts have thus far split in their rulings on the FTC ban, with appeals pending. The commission has also lost merger battles with Microsoft, Meta and United Health, while blocking mergers sought by Cigna, Adobe and Sanofi, among others.

Lawsuits by the FTC and DOJ against Amazon, Google and Apple are pending. The Biden administration’s close scrutiny of Big Tech – a movement that began under Trump – has also been cheered by many conservative Republicans. Seventeen states joined the FTC’s Sept. 2023 lawsuit against Amazon.

Khan’s efforts against Big Tech have also collected her fierce critics among wealthy Democrats supporting Vice President Kamala Harris in the presidential race. Tech billionaires Reid Hoffman, the LinkedIn co-founder; Barry Diller, the chairman of media giant IAC; and venture capitalist Vinod Khosla have all called for Khan’s firing, arguing that she doesn’t understand the industry and has become too aggressive in regulating these companies.

Whereas conservatives have expressed concerns about these tech giants’ ability to suppress content and censor views on their platforms, Biden’s regulators have focused on behaviors the companies’ size enables to exert monopoly power in online advertising and consumer pricing. 

Still, even with Vance and some key Republicans supporting her, says Candeub, the law professor, the FTC agenda in a second Trump administration would become “far more favorable to business than what Lina Khan is doing.”