June 22, 2026, 16:01 GMT | Comment Andrew Ferguson doesn’t lack for confidence. The second person in a row under the age of 40 appointed to lead the US Federal Trade Commission, Ferguson is a fast-talking, sharp-minded conservative who brings an air of self-assured command to the leadership of the 111-year-old antitrust and consumer protection agency.

When Ferguson talks about the FTC, which was created as a bipartisan, five-member Commission, he tends to avoid the first-person plural “we.”

Discussing actions by the Commission, he favors "I.” 

Here, he discusses negotiated settlements of agency investigations:

“I'm happy to enter into settlements if I think that they're a big win for consumers, and I've done so, and will continue to do so,” Ferguson told MLex during a recent interview in his office in the FTC’s headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue. “Particularly if parties are very responsive on CIDs [Civil Investigative Demands], I'm more likely to be apt to negotiate something if I think they're being honest with me in their disclosures. But I think it's important people understand: I'm not going to take nonresponse to this CID as a reason to delay something for many years or not to sue. If I have enough evidence to proceed to litigation on a consumer protection or antitrust violation without a response to CID, it's going to happen.”

Ferguson, whose 40th birthday was last Wednesday, offers a different tone than earlier chairs such as Maureen Ohlhausen, Joseph Simons or Edith Ramirez, who at least publicly operated on a first-among-equals basis as the chair of a five-person Commission which was usually split 3-2 between Republicans and Democrats. 

That began to change when Lina Khan became FTC chair in 2021 at the age of 32, and there was criticism that Khan held too much authority within the chair’s office. With President Donald Trump firing the Democrats on the FTC last year, however, leaving the FTC with a governing Commission of two Republicans, Ferguson sounds more like a CEO who holds the ultimate authority at the FTC.

With his choice of the first-person pronoun, Ferguson's tone sometimes sounds more like that of a monarch: "La FTC, c'est moi.” In an extended interview with MLex, his use of "I" was overwhelmingly associated with his decision-making authority. Instead of saying, “the FTC will take action,” Ferguson tends to say, "I will come after you."

And that tone reflects the reality. Ferguson, joined by fellow Republican Mark Meador, really is the FTC. When he speaks from the chair, he speaks with a tone of complete command.

— Faith and enforcement —

Ferguson’s office is on the fourth floor of the FTC headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue — a five-minute drive from the US Supreme Court — and it has spartan decor. But what immediately catches a visitor's eye is a large metal cross on the wall behind his chair, and nearby, a photo with Justice Clarence Thomas. Ferguson clerked for Thomas at the Supreme Court in 2016 and 2017.

The FTC Chairman, who grew up Presbyterian in Virginia and converted to Catholicism not long ago, often mentions his faith in public remarks and how it has served as a guidepost for his work at the FTC.

In a recent speech in Hungary, Ferguson invoked Dante Alighieri's epic poem in a discussion of commercial fraudsters.

"In Dante’s Inferno, the lowest regions of hell do not house the murderers and the blasphemers, who do violence to others and even God Himself. Dante reserves the lowest regions of hell for those who, out of an insatiable lust for power or profit, break the sacred bonds that tie us to our fellow man, our family, our benefactors, and our nation," the FTC chairman said in Budapest in March.

"So, Dante places all kinds of commercial fraudsters in the eighth circle of hell. These men gain at the expense of others, not through open violence, but by means hidden from public view: the backroom deal, the hidden clause, the misleading sales pitch," he said.

These rogues won power and wealth by perverting that which societies rely upon to build trust — by falsifying speech, counsel, appearance, money, and public office. In Dante’s view, the fraudulent are a more deadly poison to the body politic than even the violent, Ferguson said.

"Dante’s vision helps us to appreciate the fundamental role that antitrust enforcement and consumer protection play in preserving the bonds of civic trust that tie us together as a unified whole, as a nation founded on mutual trust and respect of the rights of each of its members," he said.

Ferguson, who also serves as the Vice Chairman of the White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud under US Vice President JD Vance, said he has taken the time to learn new areas of law.

“It's not a second job,” he said. “It’s part of my job as FTC Chairman. The president asked me, as FTC chairman, to participate in the general anti-fraud work of the federal government. They dovetail nicely.”

The FTC's enforcement against scams has a lot in common with the investigation of fraud against the federal government, Ferguson said, and he has had to learn a lot about Medicaid and Medicare.

“I’ve just added hours to my day. I mean, it hasn't changed the amount of work that I'm doing that is FTC-specific. It's just layered on additional work, which is super important, and so I sleep less, and I exercise less, and I eat less, and I see my wife less, but otherwise it hasn't affected my work on FTC-specific matters. I just have other stuff I'm doing on top of my FTC job,” Ferguson said.

— Humphrey's Executor —

The FTC chairman has defended US President Donald Trump’s authority to oust two Democratic Party commissioners from the agency, saying they were removed lawfully and predicting that the Supreme Court will overrule a 90-year old case — Humphrey's Executor v. United States — that has limited presidential power to remove independent agency members (see here).

"I'm not concerned, because I think that President Biden had the power — if President Biden was even aware that he had appointed me given his condition by 2024 — to fire me at the time. If I'm here in 2029 and if we have a Democrat President, he or she has the power to fire me. I will not be here," he said.

"If there's not a Republican president, I will not hold this post. [It's] very clear but yes, I think that they have the power to do it. I have zero concern about that fact. And if a Democrat president doesn't want to have any Republican commissioners, it's not that different than the 15 months of the Biden administration, when there were no Republican commissioners here, and you know, I think that that is up to the president to calculate what he thinks is best for the Commission, the government, and then explain that to the American people."

The landmark 1935 Supreme Court ruling in Humphrey's Executor established that Congress can constitutionally limit the president's power to remove officials from independent regulatory agencies such as the FTC. Some observers have argued, however, that Humphreys Executor was construed narrowly in 2020 by Seila Law LLC v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which gave the president more authority under certain circumstances over agencies that are found to exercise executive power.

Ferguson has argued that the FTC exercises such power and that, under the reasoning of Seila Law, the president has authority to remove commissioners.

The high court is set to rule any day on that issue.

— Vision —

While Ferguson accepts that his future at the FTC is governed by the occupant of the White House, he embraces his current opportunity to make significant changes to the structure and policies of the agency.

He has discussed the possibility of creating a separate privacy-enforcement arm of the FTC if Congress passes national privacy legislation that would empower the agency as the chief US privacy enforcer (see here ), or to dispense with the FTC’s three-decade tradition of making its antitrust and consumer protection administrative orders last 20 years (see here).

“As I generally understood this bill,” Ferguson told MLex of the proposed SECURE Data Act, “I would probably end up creating a third bureau and move the privacy work that is currently done in [the Bureau of Consumer Protection] into a new Privacy Bureau, which would not only be to enforce this law but other privacy-related laws that we enforce today, like the many COPPA cases I brought in the last 18 months." COPPA is the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act.

Ferguson declined to discuss a proposal by X to terminate a 20-year privacy oversight order that was agreed to in 2022 before Elon Musk acquired the company. He said he is unconcerned about the optics of granting a request by a social media company owned by Trump-ally Musk to escape an administrative order just a few years into its term — a modification few other companies have won from the FTC.

The plural pronoun "our" makes an appearance when Ferguson refers to the disputed action of a prior commission.

“If they have successfully staked a claim that our orders are not consistent with our practice, or with the law, or with the concerns that led to the orders in the first place, then I will follow the law on this,” Ferguson said.

The FTC’s antitrust litigation against Amazon, due to go to trial next year in a federal court in Seattle, remains a top priority of the chairman.

“I spent more money litigating this case than I spent on any one case since I became chairman,” Ferguson told MLex. “It's a very expensive case, requires a lot of experts — it required tremendous expert spend — and I have made the resources available.”

— Staff morale, hiring —

The FTC, like many agencies in the federal government, has seen a staff exodus thanks to firings, voluntary departures and two rounds of the Deferred Resignation Program. A recent survey found that a majority of FTC employees felt “less engaged” at work in 2025.

The nonprofit group Partnership for Public Service said that more than 51 percent of those surveyed reported declining engagement, while 42 percent said their engagement was about the same and six percent said it improved compared to the prior year. The nonprofit's survey sought to fill a gap created when the Office of Personnel Management canceled the Federal Viewpoint Survey in August 2025.

The agency edged out the government-wide average for “Employee Engagement and Satisfaction.” 

“The exiting of around 20 percent of the workforce total at [the end of] 2025 — at least that's what we told Congress — has not slowed our work rate at all,” Ferguson said.

Staff in the Bureau of Consumer Protection understand the kind of cases Ferguson wants to take on, and know that he “wanted a lot of them.”

“I can barely keep up with BCP’s work rate,” Ferguson said.

FTC job postings jobs receive hundreds of applications, he said. “It's been like an embarrassment of riches on the hiring process.”

Ferguson said when the Bureau of Economics published job ads, “We got so many high-qualified PhD economist applications that they came back and said, ‘Can we basically hire against our expected attrition that hasn't happened yet?’ ”

Ferguson said he approved hiring in advance of expected attrition next year. “Based on our prediction of attrition, and it's been like that in BCP and [Bureau of Competition], just a wealth of applications, and I know some of the other agencies have said that they struggle with hiring,” he said.

In order to boost staff morale, Ferguson said he holds brown bag lunches at both the headquarters and the FTC offices at the US Government Accountability Office building to give staffers the opportunity for a 30- to 45-minute chat over lunch.

“They actually don't normally bring their lunches. Don't know why. It's normally just like a chat in a conference room, but we're doing it like one-third of one shop at a time, so that it's not just like a big gang. It's time for people to actually ask me questions, and I can ask them questions,” Ferguson said.

“The main thing is, I think, people at the agency know that I go to bat for them throughout the admin,” he said.

The FTC chairman said he thinks staff morale has been higher at his agency than in other parts of the federal government “because I came in very early on and said, ‘This is my agenda, if you execute it, you have a place here, and I will back you and protect you, and I will get the agency what it needs. But I have an agenda. Let's go do it.' And that's what we've done.

“It's why this agency has been so effective, is that I made it very clear early on, because I believe this president is the elected head of the executive branch, and he sets the policy agenda, and then I execute the laws within the policy agendas, but within that agenda, I told my guys, I want you to bring cases. This isn't 2000s Republicanism. I want cases, I want to break case records. I have my priorities, and I want us to just hammer them.”

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