Federal regulatory agency
Appears in 10 stories
Plaintiff and enforcer in the settlement
In 2014, OkCupid quietly funneled nearly three million user photos — along with demographic and location data — to Clarifai, a facial recognition startup backed by OkCupid's own co-founders. Users never consented. OkCupid's privacy policy said this wouldn't happen. When a New York Times article exposed the arrangement five years later, OkCupid publicly denied it.
Updated Mar 30
Expected to conduct antitrust review of the deal
Sysco, the company that delivers food to roughly one in every six restaurants in America, announced on March 30 that it would buy Jetro Restaurant Depot—the nation's largest cash-and-carry wholesaler—for $29.1 billion. The deal would combine Sysco's truck-based delivery empire with Restaurant Depot's 166 warehouse stores where independent restaurant owners walk in, load a cart, and pay cash. If approved, it would create an omnichannel food distribution giant serving more than a million customers through both delivery and self-service.
Defendant, appealing district court ruling
The Hart-Scott-Rodino premerger notification form went largely unchanged for 48 years. When the Federal Trade Commission tripled its compliance burden in 2024, business groups sued—and a Texas federal judge just agreed with them.
Updated Feb 18
Primary merger review authority
The United States raised the minimum deal size requiring federal antitrust review to $133.9 million on February 15, 2026—up from $126.4 million the previous year. Companies planning mergers or acquisitions above this threshold must now file premerger notifications with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Department of Justice (DOJ) and wait for government clearance before closing their deals.
Updated Feb 16
Actively litigating against pharmacy benefit managers
On January 1, 2026, two unprecedented insulin programs launched simultaneously: nonprofit Civica Rx began distributing insulin glargine pens for $55 per box, while California became the first state to sell its own CalRx-branded insulin at the same price point—both undercutting branded products by up to 90%. The coordinated launches mark the first major breach in a pricing fortress built by three pharmaceutical giants who control 90% of the U.S. insulin market. Unlike existing insulin, these products require no insurance forms, no rebates, no hidden markups. Just one transparent price available to anyone.
Updated Feb 10
Reviewing transaction
Johnson & Johnson spun off its consumer health division as Kenvue in May 2023, creating the world's largest pure-play consumer health company. Less than three years later, shareholders of both Kimberly-Clark and Kenvue have overwhelmingly approved a $48.7 billion acquisition that will absorb Kenvue into the Kleenex and Huggies maker—with 96% of Kimberly-Clark shares and 99% of Kenvue shares voting in favor. On January 30, 2026, The Lancet published a comprehensive study finding no evidence linking acetaminophen use during pregnancy to autism, directly contradicting concerns raised by the Trump administration that had sent Kenvue's stock tumbling in late 2025.
Updated Feb 5
Undergoing major policy shift on AI regulation
The FTC just tore up its own rulebook. On December 22, 2025, the agency voted 2-0 to reverse a year-old enforcement action against Rytr, an AI writing tool accused of enabling fake reviews. The reason? The original case 'unduly burdens AI innovation' and violates Trump's AI Action Plan. Yet on the same day, the agency sent warning letters to 10 companies for suspected fake review violations, threatening civil penalties up to $53,088 per violation.
Updated Dec 29, 2025
Scrutinizing tech consolidation; cleared Nvidia-Intel deal December 19
On Christmas Eve 2025, Nvidia paid $20 billion for Groq's assets—nearly triple the AI chip startup's $6.9 billion valuation from three months earlier. The deal brings Groq's founder Jonathan Ross, who created Google's original Tensor Processing Unit, and his breakthrough inference technology into Nvidia's fold. It's Nvidia's largest acquisition ever, nearly three times bigger than its $7 billion Mellanox purchase. By structuring the deal as a "non-exclusive licensing agreement" rather than an outright acquisition, Nvidia bypasses Hart-Scott-Rodino Act merger review requirements that trigger automatic FTC scrutiny—following Microsoft's 2024 playbook with Inflection AI. The deal's unusual structure has drawn immediate analyst warnings about "the fiction of competition" as Groq's leadership and technical talent move to Nvidia while the company nominally continues independently. Adding to the intrigue: 1789 Capital, where Donald Trump Jr. serves as partner, was among Groq's September investors who saw their stake nearly triple in just three months.
Updated Dec 27, 2025
U.S. competition regulator conditioning Boeing–Spirit merger
On December 8, 2025, Boeing completed its $4.7 billion acquisition of Spirit AeroSystems, valuing the deal at about $8.3 billion including debt and reversing a 2005 spin‑off that created the world’s largest independent aerostructures supplier. The transaction folds Spirit’s Boeing‑related commercial and aftermarket work — including 737, 767, 777 and 787 fuselages and major structures — back into Boeing, while carving out a separate Spirit Defense unit and divesting all Airbus‑related Spirit sites to Airbus and Spirit’s Malaysian plant to CTRM to satisfy U.S. and EU antitrust conditions.
Updated Dec 11, 2025
Test case for whether presidents may fire independent commissioners at will
In 2025, President Donald Trump launched an aggressive campaign to assert sweeping authority over independent federal agencies, testing the long‑standing 1935 Supreme Court precedent in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States that limited presidential power to fire members of multi‑member regulatory commissions. After the Supreme Court used its emergency docket to let Trump remove Democratic members of the National Labor Relations Board, the Merit Systems Protection Board, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the conflict escalated when Trump fired Democratic Federal Trade Commission commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter in March 2025 and later attempted to oust Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook, both before their fixed terms expired.
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