The Trump administration’s antitrust leaders have recently announced plans to maintain the Biden administration’s enforcement priorities, catching many observers by surprise. Andrew Ferguson, the new Federal Trade Commission (FTC) chairman, and Gail Slater, the likely incoming head of the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Antitrust Division, have both committed to preserving the 2023 Merger Guidelines and continuing to enforce antitrust law in labor markets.

This unexpected continuity has dismayed the critics of Biden-era antitrust enforcement. These critics—economists, centrist and right-leaning legal scholars, and corporate defense attorneys—had dismissed the 2023 guidelines as reflecting economic confusion, populist impulses, or a leftist agenda. Lawyers assured their corporate clients that these guidelines would expire with the Biden administration and expressed skepticism about labor antitrust enforcement. Their clients might now wonder whether they can still trust their lawyers to give them reliable advice.

To understand the continuity from 2024 to 2025, we can start by recognizing the continuity from 2020 to 2021. The first Trump DOJ and FTC followed traditional antitrust enforcement policies in most respects, but they innovated in two ways. They brought the first serious challenges to Big Tech (including the successful case against Google that concluded last year), and brought several civil and criminal labor antitrust cases.

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