Former US Department of Justice official Roger Alford said there will probably be a lack of serious antitrust enforcement during the remaining years of the Trump administration.
Former US Department of Justice official Roger Alford said there will probably be a lack of serious antitrust enforcement during the remaining years of the Trump administration.The ex-principal deputy assistant attorney general said at a Washington, DC, event * that the “working assumption” is that any serious antitrust enforcement will be done by state enforcers and the private bar.
Alford cited the DOJ’s settlement in the Live Nation case, which senior officials reached without consulting career attorneys, as evidence of this administration’s aversion to rigorous enforcement.
But he said there might continue to be strong criminal antitrust enforcement because that’s an area of interest of acting US Assistant Attorney General Omeed A. Assefi.
Alford, who was fired last year for insubordination after objecting to a merger settlement between the DOJ, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Juniper Networks, said antitrust enforcement in President Donald Trump’s second term is more political than in the first term.
He told reporters after the session that last month’s dismissal of former Assistant Attorney General Gail Slater was a “lost opportunity” to do strong enforcement.
At the event, former Federal Trade Commission member Terrell McSweeny took a more nuanced view of the Trump administration’s enforcement.
“There is business as usual in some ways at DOJ and FTC. The federal apparatus isn’t being dismantled, but there are some uncertainties,” said McSweeny, a Democrat who was also an official at the Antitrust Division during the Obama administration.
McSweeny also noted antitrust trials can be difficult because judges struggle with predicting the future because they are limited to the facts in front of them.
Alford, who has returned to teaching law at the University of Notre Dame, said he’s pleased that the FTC has appealed its loss in the lawsuit in which it sought to unravel Meta’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp — each made more than a decade ago.
US District Judge James Boasberg handed the FTC a loss in November, finding that Meta lacked monopoly power in the market for personal social networking services and must contend with the likes of TikTok, its “fiercest rival.”
Alford said the agency made several avoidable mistakes, such as filing the case in Washington, DC, rather than more friendly venues such as Eastern Virginia or Texas.
But Meta Vice President Timothy Lamb said Boasberg’s opinion was a “textbook example” of how to deal with the issue of market definition. Lamb said Boasberg realized the empirical evidence that Meta competes with both YouTube and TikTok.
*American Bar Association Antitrust Spring Meeting 2026. Washington, DC. March 25-27, 2026.
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