Bolster antitrust enforcement to ensure we have a competitive, vibrant economy
Markets are no longer free when just a small handful of monopolies control them. When monopolies tighten their grip, prices rise, product quality declines, wages stagnate, small businesses wither, and innovation dies. This is not capitalism, where competition in the market benefits all; it is a power grab.
No company should be so powerful that it can solely dictate prices, crush all competition, or engage in price gouging. A thriving marketplace depends on choice, competition, and opportunity. Breaking up monopolies revives local businesses, drives down costs, and promotes opportunity and innovation.
When only a few corporations own and shape the overwhelming majority of news coverage — with estimates showing six companies controlling 90% of U.S. media — it concentrates the power to influence public opinion, narrows the range of voices people hear from, and weakens the democratic debate essential to a thriving republic. From mega mergers to media empires, concentrated power must be broken up for the sake of a competitive and fair economy and a free society.
However, tools designed to break up monopolies only work when regulators choose to use them. For decades, narrow interpretations of antitrust law and outdated standards for evaluating competition have allowed dominant firms in tech, media, healthcare, finance, pharmaceuticals, and agriculture to consolidate unchecked. Project 2029 supports updating enforcement standards to reflect the realities of the modern economy, where platform dominance, data control, and private-equity roll-ups can crush competition just as effectively as the monopolies of the past.
We are working diligently to usher in a new era of anti-trust enforcement to break the chains of monopoly and let fairness flourish once more. Our anti-trust policies include:
Directing the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission to stringently enforce the Sherman Antitrust Act. This Act prohibits monopolization or attempts at monopolizing any aspect of interstate trade or commerce. It restricts business activities that inhibit interstate commerce and competition, including contracts, combinations, and conspiracies in restraint of trade, and subjects the most serious violations to criminal prosecution. This act has been the basis for numerous antitrust cases over the years, but lenient enforcement has enabled rampant monopolization in recent decades.
Directing the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission to stringently enforce the Clayton Antitrust Act, which was enacted to strengthen and supplement the Sherman Antitrust Act. It explicitly outlaws price discrimination against competing companies, conditioning sales on exclusive dealing, and mergers and acquisitions when they may substantially reduce competition or tend to create a monopoly. Additionally, the Clayton Act exempts labor unions and agricultural cooperatives from antitrust liability, recognizing the importance of collective bargaining and cooperative activities. Like the Sherman Act, the Clayton Act is enforced by the DOJ and the FTC and has been influential in shaping antitrust policy and enforcement in the United States.
Leveraging the Federal Trade Commission to crack down on unlawful monopolies. The Federal Trade Commission Act established the FTC as a regulatory agency charged with promoting consumer protection and preventing anticompetitive practices. While not exclusively focused on antitrust matters, the FTC Act grants the FTC broad authority to investigate and take action against unfair methods of competition and unfair or deceptive acts or practices affecting commerce. The FTC Act complements the Sherman and Clayton Acts by providing the FTC with additional tools to address anticompetitive behavior and protect consumers from deceptive or unfair business practices. During the previous administration, the FTC was leveraged to reclaim the agency’s existing powers, which included revamping its scrutiny of mergers with the aim of unleashing a crackdown on monopolies.
Directing the Treasury to resume enforcement of the Corporate Transparency Act to expose shell companies. Shell companies and beneficial ownership concealment can distort fair market competition, so it is essential to enforce this act to ensure a more equitable economic environment.
Issuing an Executive Order directing the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission to adopt a posture of stringent merger enforcement under the 2023 Merger Guidelines, which established updated standards for evaluating whether mergers and acquisitions substantially reduce competition, including in labor markets, digital platforms, and multi-sided markets. While the current administration has nominally retained these guidelines, enforcement practice has shifted toward accepting negotiated consent decrees and divestitures rather than litigating to block harmful consolidation outright. This order directs both agencies to fully apply the guidelines' structural presumption against mergers in already-concentrated markets, to resist remedies that merely paper over competitive harm, and to prioritize affirmative litigation in healthcare, technology, agriculture, and media sectors where consolidation has accelerated despite clear guideline coverage.
Directing the Federal Trade Commission to issue a rule under Section 5 of the FTC Act establishing that algorithmic price coordination among competitors constitutes an unfair method of competition, regardless of whether a formal agreement exists between the competing firms. The use of shared pricing algorithms allows competitors to effectively coordinate prices without direct communication, achieving the same anticompetitive outcome as a price-fixing conspiracy while evading the per se illegality that would attach to an explicit agreement. A White House CEA analysis found this practice cost tenants an estimated $3.8 billion in excess rent in 2023 alone. While the DOJ has previously pursued Sherman Act litigation against algorithmic price coordination, Section 5's prohibition on unfair methods of competition does not require proof of a formal agreement, making FTC rulemaking the appropriate vehicle for establishing a durable, prospective standard that algorithmic coordination cannot evade.
Directing the Federal Trade Commission to develop a systematic enforcement framework and seek legislative reform of Hart-Scott-Rodino (HSR) notification thresholds to address serial acquisitions by private equity firms and other corporate acquirers, where roll-up strategies allow acquirers to accumulate dominant market positions through a series of individually small transactions that each fall below federal merger notification thresholds but collectively produce the same anticompetitive concentration that a single large merger would require regulatory approval to achieve. The FTC retains authority under Section 5 and Section 7 of the Clayton Act to investigate and challenge these roll-up strategies, and has continued to exercise that authority on a case-by-case basis, while publishing a market study on physician practice mergers in June 2025. However, case-by-case enforcement without systematic notification requirements allows the bulk of sub-threshold roll-up activity to proceed without any agency review. Closing that gap requires both a formal enforcement framework and HSR threshold reform.
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Directing the Federal Trade Commission to expand the scope of its rule on unfair or deceptive fees, which is currently limited to live-event ticketing and short-term lodging, to cover the full range of industries where hidden and mandatory fees distort consumer decision-making and undermine price competition. A White House CEA analysis found that junk fees cost American consumers an estimated $65 billion annually across banking, rental cars, airlines, rental housing, and other markets, yet the existing rule leaves most of that harm unaddressed. The FTC retains authority under its Section 5 unfair or deceptive acts and practices jurisdiction to pursue expanded rulemaking, and doing so would restore price transparency while closing gaps within the rule’s narrow current scope.
Directing the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission to issue a formal rule implementing and strengthening the labor market provisions of the 2025 Antitrust Guidelines for Business Activities Affecting Workers, which identify third-party compensation data services, algorithmic wage-setting tools, and employer data-sharing arrangements as potential antitrust violations but provide no binding enforcement mechanism or safe harbor framework. Competing employers using shared compensation benchmarking platforms can effectively coordinate wages without direct communication, which essentially is the labor market equivalent of the algorithmic pricing problem in product markets. Yet existing guidelines leave this conduct in a legal gray zone that neither deters coordination nor gives compliant employers clear guidance on permissible benchmarking. A formal rule would establish enforceable prohibitions on compensation data-sharing arrangements that function as wage coordination, while providing a clear safe harbor for legitimate benchmarking that does not suppress worker compensation.
Issuing an Executive Order directing all federal agencies to incorporate competition impact assessments into their regulatory review processes, requiring agencies to evaluate whether proposed regulations, licensing requirements, procurement rules, or subsidy programs create or reinforce barriers to market entry that benefit incumbent dominant firms at the expense of competitors, workers, or consumers. The executive branch has long required cost-benefit analysis of proposed regulations through OIRA review. Extending that framework to include a structured competition analysis would institutionalize pro-competitive principles across the entire federal regulatory apparatus.
