Attorneys inside and outside the US Department of Justice's Antitrust Division are expressing concern this week about the potential closure of field offices in Chicago and San Francisco.
Attorneys inside and outside the US Department of Justice's Antitrust Division are expressing concern this week about the potential closure of field offices in Chicago and San Francisco.In private chats with competition lawyers in Washington, DC during the antitrust bar’s biggest networking events, multiple concerns were raised about the prospective closure of the offices, which are viewed as critical for criminal and civil antitrust enforcement.
The DOJ last year was seeking to build out its San Francisco office and hire trial attorneys to focus on civil matters (see here). For criminal work, members of the Antitrust Division’s San Francisco team have been handling the DOJ’s prosecution of a healthcare staffing executive for alleged wage-fixing and fraud, a case that is currently being tried before a jury in Nevada (see here).
The current situation is reminiscent of past decisions affecting the Antitrust Division.
In 2011, the DOJ announced the closure of Antitrust Division field offices in Atlanta, Cleveland, Dallas, and Philadelphia. Those moves influenced the agency’s criminal enforcement, consolidating functions into offices in Chicago, New York, San Francisco and Washington, DC.
Vic Domen, former senior antitrust counsel at the Tennessee Attorney General’s Office, at an event* yesterday discussed how the shuttering of the DOJ’s Atlanta office affected state competition enforcers.
In Nashville, the Atlanta field office for the DOJ “was our relationship, and that was not only for civil matters, but also criminal matters,” said Domen, who is now a partner at DLA Piper.
“There were relationships that were formed … in the southeastern United States with that Atlanta office, and when it closed, we lost those relationships," because many of the lawyers who had worked there retired or moved on to other things, Domen said.
Closing the DOJ’s Chicago field office could hamper a major Trump administration priority — tackling high food prices. The DOJ, for example, is currently investigating the price of eggs, MLex understands.
“The Division made Chicago a center for enforcement in the Agriculture Industry so that the enforcers would be closer to the farmers, ranchers, and small business,” former Biden DOJ antitrust lieutenant Michael Kades said in a post on X in March that defended what he called a “seed-to-table” antitrust strategy.
Closing the Chicago and San Francisco offices could also hamper the Procurement Collusion Strike Force, a signature Trump antitrust initiative that had been embraced and expanded under the Biden administration. The PCSF was established by Makan Delrahim, the head of the Antitrust Division during the first Trump administration.
The San Francisco and Chicago offices handle a substantial portion of the work of the PCSF, which collaborates with a dozen law enforcement partners nationwide and across borders to crack down on anticompetitive conduct that threatens billions of dollars in local, state and federal government expenditures.
Closing field offices isn’t ultimately up to Antitrust Division leadership. Abigail Slater, the new leader of the US Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division, is understood to be an advocate for the offices.
Yesterday was the division’s deadline to make its case for decision-makers higher up the food chain, and the division pushed back on proposed closures, it is understood.
Slater and US Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson are having hard conversations right now about how to balance resource constraints and government restructuring against existing workloads and new enforcement ambitions (see here).
– Additional reporting by Madeline Hughes
*American Bar Association Antitrust Spring Meeting 2025. Washington, DC. April 2-4, 2025.
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