Questions for Lina Khan Tomorrow

November 9th, 2023

On Friday, 11:15 a.m. Eastern, Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan will appear before the Federalist Society National Lawyers Convention. I commend Chair Khan for speaking at the event and for her willingness to take questions. 

I hope the questions will be direct. Here are some suggestions:

Chair Khan, are you disappointed that federal courts have adhered to the consumer welfare standard and failed to adopt your more expansive vision of antitrust law? 

For years, you made the case that Amazon was the prime example (pun intended) of the need to jettison the consumer welfare standard. Why is it, then, that you have made consumer welfare and price the centerpiece of your lawsuit against Amazon?

You keep going after the Illumina-Grail merger, which has produced a life-saving blood assay test. Do you worry that you might be choking off innovation that can save lives?

The lawsuit to prevent Meta from acquiring Within came to an embarrassing end, kicked to the curb by a federal judge. Some, such as Rep. Kevin Kiley, have suggested that you are bringing marginal cases and losing in order to prove the point that the current laws are insufficient for our modern antitrust problems, and your cases are designed to prod Congress to change the law. Are you intentionally bringing bad cases to lose? Or you think that your cases are good and that the courts are wrong? Or are you just bad at your job?

For many years, an OPM poll showed FTC was the federal agency most highly rated by its employees. You were appointed chair and undertook some unprecedented changes. You banned your experts from speaking, even attending, many outside events in which FTC experts interacted with legal practitioners, companies, and market experts. Former Commissioner Christine Wilson says that you killed off the lively spirit of open and free-wheeling debate between your experts internally as well. She said you centralized decision-making in the Office of the Chair and that you’ve driven out seasoned, expert staff – while recruiting people from left-leaning NGOs. After all that, the morale of your organization went from first to last. 

Why do your employees give you – the leadership – the lowest marks in the OPM poll for – and this is a quote directly from the poll – for “honesty and integrity”?

Is it fair to say that you’ve replaced many of the seasoned experts who’ve departed with Soros-funded, NGO activists? Are you worried about the FTC seeming to be too close to the Soros-funded Tech Transparency Project and the Omidyar-funded American Economic Liberties Project?