While high-profile economic populists in President Joe Biden’s administration — namely Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan, Department of Justice antitrust division chief Jonathan Kanter and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Director Rohit Chopra — might get more headlines for their attempts to reshape American industry, Buttigieg might be up to something just as radical. Buttigieg has moved beyond simply punishing bad actors to using the powers of his executive agency to restructure a market it oversees.
Whether the changes Buttigieg has made will outlast his tenure — or that of a president who called on his Cabinet to fight concentrated corporate power — is a fair question. The regulatory changes he’s instituted “could be a smashing success, or could get caught up in the machinery,” says Diana Moss, director of competition policy at the left-of-center think tank Progressive Policy Institute. One key rule is currently blocked in court, while others won’t take full effect until the next president is in office, with their ultimate success dependent on agency staffers having the resources and willingness to fully execute them. Airlines are still merging, and the economics of commercial aviation is just one slice of his sweeping portfolio.
But Buttigieg has emerged as a surprising ally to, and asset for, the slice of the political left that has embraced an antimonopoly, antitrust framework — a wing of the Democratic Party now fighting to maintain its dominance in a post-Biden Washington, and that once saw Buttigieg as an adversary.
Read more in Politico Magazine.
