By George Landrith
The Biden Administration’s antitrust record was a dumpster fire of regulatory overreach, ideological extremism, and self-defeating incompetence. And given the troubling popularity of Biden’s anti-capitalist FTC chair Lina Khan in some conservative circles, free market champions have watched anxiously to see whether the Trump-Vance administration would make a clean break and turn away from the over-administrative state.
A major announcement last week from Department of Justice antitrust chief Gail Slater should help restore confidence.
Slater’s statement approving T-Mobile’s acquisition of UScellular was a model of the thoughtful, principled, nuanced reasoning sorely missing from Khan’s Manichean worldview. While acknowledging concerns about mobile market concentration, Slater rightly concluded that UScellular would not remain a viable, long-term competitor on its own—and that its customers would benefit more from lower prices and faster speeds under a better-capitalized owner than from being stranded with a failing provider.
Contrast that with the Biden DOJ’s knee-jerk rejection of the JetBlue-Spirit merger in 2023. DOJ regulators insisted Spirit was a viable long-term competitor and would “continue expanding at a quick pace” even absent the merger. Instead, its stock tanked 90%, and the airline declared bankruptcy within the year. Whoops. Slater understands what her predecessors didn’t: wishing a struggling firm into financial health doesn’t make it so.
At the same time, Slater’s statement sent a clear warning to the three dominant carriers—AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile—who together control 82% of U.S. spectrum licenses and 90% of the market. Just days after Congress greenlit new spectrum auctions in the reconciliation bill, DOJ signaled that any efforts to pry contested bands away from emerging competitors in the consumer mobile and enterprise private 5G markets will now face serious scrutiny.
Here too, DOJ got this question right. The market shrank from four national carriers to three after the 2020 Sprint-T-Mobile merger. Competition would erode further if cable providers—who now serve nearly 20 million mobile lines—lose access to the Wi-Fi and CBRS bands that power their offerings.
While the carriers hope the FCC will claw back and re-auction those bands, DOJ’s strong stance should put those ambitions on ice. Unlike the Biden team’s tortured attempts to invent consumer harms, this is a textbook application of the Consumer Welfare Standard: weakening emerging competitors in a concentrated market only entrenches dominant incumbents and increases prices.
Slater’s statement marks a welcome return to the longstanding, bipartisan antitrust consensus: focus on real harms to American workers and consumers, not the pet theories of left-wing legal academics. Let’s hope she – and FTC counterpart Andrew Ferguson – now build on this progress and continue turning the page on the neo-Brandeisian excesses of the Biden era.
Where the last administration gleefully waged war on American technology leaders manning the front lines of our global competition with China, Slater and Ferguson now have an opportunity to reset and chart their own path. It’s time to reject, once and for all, the Biden-Khan dogma that success is a crime.