The Trump administration is reversing Biden policies everywhere. But it’s keeping this one

President Donald Trump’s administration wants to roll back virtually all of former President Joe Biden’s policies. So it may come as a surprise that the Trump administration is keeping a key Biden framework designed to rein in Corporate America. federal regulators’ stricter guidelines around policing major corporate mergers.

President Donald Trump’s administration wants to roll back virtually all of former president Joe Biden’s policies. So it may come as a surprise that the Trump administration is keeping a key Biden framework designed to rein in Corporate America. New Federal Trade Commission Chair Andrew Ferguson said Tuesday that the Trump administration would continue using Biden-era guidelines to review proposed mergers and acquisitions. These guidelines are not legally binding, but they are an important tool that provide guidance to companies, courts and agencies about how the FTC and Justice Department review whether deals harm competition. The FTC and Justice Department’s joint merger guidelines from 2023 “are in effect and are the framework for this agency’s merger-review analysis,” Ferguson said in a memo to staff. The merger guidelines— the first update to how the US government reviews mergers in more than a decade — encouraged tighter scrutiny of mergers’ impact on worker pay and online markets. They were part of the Biden administration’s aggressive approach to antitrust enforcement under FTC Chair Lina Khan and Justice Department antitrust chief Jonathan Kanter. The Biden administration challenged a number of major mergers, going after tech companies such as Google, Amazon and Meta. The FTC under Khan enraged business leaders, who accused the agency of stifling innovation and competition. Corporate America was happy to see Khan gone and salivated at the prospect of looser enforcement under Trump. Some predicted a new administration would unleash a wave of mergers. “The merger guidelines were extraordinarily unpopular in the business community. They gave the government a lot of flexibility to bring cases,” said Vadim Brusser, an antitrust attorney at Sidley Austin. “There was thought that a Republican administration would potentially scale them back.”