During his first term, President Trump made good on his promise to slash red tape. The administration famously implemented a “two-for-one” rule, requiring federal agencies to eliminate two existing regulations for every new one they issued. This initiative resulted in significant cost savings for American businesses and consumers, fueling economic growth and job creation. And that same spirit has animated his second term. The pledge has been supercharged to a “ten-to-one” mandate, signaling an even more aggressive push to dismantle the administrative state. The focus remains squarely on unleashing the private sector from the shackles of excessive government delay, deliberation and general do-nothingness.
Meanwhile, the President’s Supreme Court picks went on to secure some of the greatest conservative legal victories in history against the administrative state, instituting the major questions doctrine and overturning Chevron deference. Both decisions significantly curb the ability of administrative agencies to regulate as they please relative to congressional and judicial oversight.
It is against this backdrop of staunchly anti-regulatory policy that the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) proposed remedies in its antitrust case against Google appear so incongruous. After a court found Google liable for monopolistic practices, the DOJ has proposed a remedy that includes the creation of an independent technical “committee.” This committee would be embedded within Google, tasked with the intricate and ongoing oversight of the company’s compliance with the government’s demands.
On its face, the establishment of such a committee is a deeply regulatory act. It involves government bureaucrats, through a court-appointed body, directly intervening in the internal operations of a private company. This level of granular supervision is precisely the kind of intrusion that the Trump administration has so vocally and consistently opposed.
Perhaps the contradiction could be forgiven if the committee’s functions were at all relevant to the findings against Google. However, the core of the case is about Google’s deal with Apple for the default placement of Google’s search engine within Apple’s Safari browser. An injunction against such deals would more than suffice. The idea for a committee of bureaucrats is an unintentional indictment of the absurdity of the rest of the proposed remedies.
The technical committee, if implemented, will oversee the requirement of Google to share search data, including user queries and advertising data, with its competitors. The DOJ acknowledges that such a demand risks user privacy and security but handwaves this all away.
They go on to defend the idea with the same rhetoric used to justify the expansive administrative state Trump is diligently dismantling elsewhere, to just trust the experts: “The Court can set the rules of the road and the parameters of the remedy and allow technical experts under its auspices and direction to implement them in a thoughtful and informed manner.” Such platitudes should hardly be comforting to those who have supported the President’s efforts to rein in unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats.
In an attempt to reconcile the striking inconsistency, some officials have recently tried to argue that antitrust enforcement is not regulation and that it can actually prevent the need for regulation. Yet if the result of antitrust enforcement is a burrowing of bureaucracies that wield immense power and responsibility within America’s leading firms, President Trump’s actions against the administrative state will look more like a relocation than a reckoning.
Ongoing antitrust cases and investigations held over from the Biden administration abound. Targets include Amazon, Meta, Apple and Microsoft, among others. With these cases far from resolved, the risk of setting problematic precedents and laying the groundwork for future administrations to command and control so many important firms and industries through internal boards and bureaus is exceptionally high. To ensure his legacy as the deregulator-in-chief, President Trump must move to resolve the case against Google and others and realign the nation’s competition regulators with his broader agenda.