A Conversation with Alvaro Bedoya on Trump's FTC Firings

Audio of this conversation is available via your favorite podcast service.

Last week, President Donald Trump ordered the firing of two Democratic members of the Federal Trade Commission, an independent agency that enforces federal consumer protection and competition laws and that, under former President Joe Biden, turned up its scrutiny of the tech sector's biggest companies. The two commissioners, Alvaro Bedoya and Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, plan to challenge Trump's firing, which they said will only benefit billionaire tech moguls like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos.

I spoke to Bedoya on Monday, March 24. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of the discussion.

Cristiano Lima-Strong:

Alvaro, thanks so much for joining us.

Alvaro Bedoya:

Thank you for having me, Cristiano, and congrats on the new gig.

Cristiano Lima-Strong:

Oh, thanks so much. Appreciate you being here. I'm sure it's an incredibly hectic time. I wanted to start off by going back to Tuesday, when you first learned that the president had ordered your firing. How did you first find out about this and what was your immediate reaction?

Alvaro Bedoya:

Sure. So I was at my daughter's gymnastics class, I'd just gotten there. And so the funny thing is, and with a week of time, I'm able to laugh about it a little bit, but my daughter really likes me to watch her the whole time because if she does a really cool trick, she'll immediately look at me. And I confess, I'm like a lot of parents that when you have a class right after work, inevitably, there's text messages and phone calls you've got to be doing. And so I was actually trying really hard to be looking at her, but then Commissioner Slaughter called me and said, "Hey, have you looked at your email?" And I said, "Actually, no, it's been a few minutes. I haven't looked at my email." And she said, "Yeah, well, I just got an email from the White House claiming that the president is firing me."

And sure enough, I opened my email, and there it was, and it was certainly something we had been contemplating might happen. But of course when you're sitting there looking at your daughter twirl on a, I really should learn all the terminology, the horizontal bar, right? That you spin over, it's... You don't expect to learn about that way. So yeah, it was a bit of a surprise.

Cristiano Lima-Strong:

The communication that you received because, and this to get into it a little bit, but you've talked about how you plan to challenge this, and the crux of this case is likely to hinge on the Supreme Court precedent from 1935, known as Humphrey's Executor, that established that the president cannot fire a Federal Trade Commission member, such as yourself, without cause. The communication that you received, it did not allege any cause. Is that right?

Alvaro Bedoya:

None. No, it simply said, the President has this authority and so the President is exercising it. And there was some line about your continued presence at the FTC is inconsistent with his agenda, but it seemed to very deliberately avoid citing the causes that statute and the Supreme Court have said can be used to fire me. It went out of its way to not cite any of those causes or really substantive cause whatsoever.

Cristiano Lima-Strong:

And this is the main reason that you all plan to allege that this is an illegal firing, right? Could you talk us through the rationale there and then what you're hoping is the result of challenging this?

Alvaro Bedoya:

Absolutely. Let me quickly do the black letter law, but I think what is very important is people understand why these protections exist to begin with. Why on earth are there these special protections for FTC commissioners? Quickly, the black letter law, 1914 FTC Act says, "Well, we can only be removed by the president," number one, "And even then, only for cause," but the words, for cause, aren't there. Instead, there are a very specific list of causes, three of them: inefficiency, neglect, and malfeasance. Those are the reasons the president can cite to remove us. So in 1935, this provision was challenged because FDR tried to remove a guy named Humphrey, Commissioner Humphrey. And Humphrey, of course, challenged that, then Humphrey subsequently passed away. And so his estate, hence Humphrey's Executor, sued for back pay. And the Supreme Court ratified that statute. They said, "FDR, you cannot do that."

There is a value in a bipartisan body. There is a value in these long terms that let these commissioners build up expertise. There is a value to these independent agencies. But again, let's zoom out from the black letter law and ask why on earth are there these special protections because I understand people who say, "Look, the president's the president. The president should be able to control, to make these kinds of decisions." Those protections come from a late 19th-century law in the late 1800s, called the Interstate Commerce Commission Act. And the men who passed the Interstate Commerce Commission lived in the Gilded Age. They lived in the world of Standard Oil and the Beef Trust and the Sugar Trust. And if you read the debates in Congress when that law was passed, they expressly talk about the dangers of concentrated power in the hands of trusts, right? And how it affects and infects government.

I don't think they use that word, but I think they used the word oligarchy and and oligarchs. And so when the FTC, pardon me, when Congress in 1914 passed the FTC Act, they wanted similar protections that would protect commissioners from that corrupting power of money in government. And so they literally copy-pasted that language over from the Interstate Commerce Commission Act into the FTC Act. And frankly, I think that this is why this case is so important. It's not just about, hey, the law says I'm protected and I shall be protected. No, the fact that we are in a time when billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, like Mark Zuckerberg, are exercising ever more power in our government, our law was designed to insulate us from those kinds of influences. And that's why I think it's a really important case and I'm optimistic that we're going to win once it's finally resolved.

Cristiano Lima-Strong:

So I was hoping you could engage with or respond to some of the criticisms of Humphrey's Executive, which conservative legal scholars for many years have been critical of. One you've alluded to, which is this idea that even a commissioner at an independent agency such as the FTC should be accountable as an unelected bureaucrat, conservatives often say, to the president who is the chief of the executive. And some of it is also agency-specific, which is that the work of the FTC has changed so much since 1935. It engages in rulemakings, in administrative proceedings, all of this, that it looks so different that that precedent can't fold in the current day. What's your response to some of those arguments?

Alvaro Bedoya:

So, look, we are going to actively litigate this imminently. And so it's wise for me to keep a certain, to zoom out quite a bit here given the forthcoming litigation. But a couple thoughts. First of all, some of our most impactful work comes from what are called market studies, 6(b) studies, and some of our most important cases are before the adjudicative bodies within the Federal Trade Commission, our administrative law judges, the commission itself when it acts as an appellate body within the commission. Two quick examples. So we issued, not one but two, separate interim reports about these little-known commercial entities known as pharmacy benefit managers. This is the middle layer between insurers and pharmacies that, in a world of a lot of vertical consolidation, means that there's an insurer who owns a pharmacy benefit manager, who has a dog in the fight in terms of the competition between pharmacies, right? There used to be tons and tons of independent pharmacies. Now they've started dying and closing, allegedly because the pharmacy benefit managers are steering business to surprise, surprise, their own pharmacies.

So, one of the findings of this most recent Staff Interim Report that was voted at 5-0 by the way. This was a unanimous vote of the Federal Trade Commission. FTC staff found that certain, quote, unquote, "specialty drugs," including cancer drugs, appear to have been marked up 4,000%. And those markups, of course, were most acute for the pharmacies, allegedly, that the PBMs, that the insurers and PBMs themselves owned. And so there's all sorts of information in this report that has made all sorts of waves in the economy, in markets, in policy, because it seems to be backing up some of the allegations that independent pharmacists and others are making. That is the kind of market study that we do that is much more, I would say, legislative in nature and that we're shedding light on a problem so that a body like Congress may be able to act on it.

Additionally, one of the most important cases that is before the commission as an adjudicative body is a case involving allegations that those same entities, pharmacy benefit managers, are competing not to lower the price of insulin for the insured patients, but to rate their insured patients. And Commissioner Slaughter and I are actually the only appellate judges in this matter because Chairman Ferguson and Commissioner Holyoak are recused. And so we are in this bizarre situation where we have no idea what happens to this case, because both of the appellate judges, according to the president, are gone. And look, it's my judge to adjudicate that case. I don't know which way it will go, but I'm pretty sure the American public benefits from it being adjudicated one way or the other. And so I think, I feel good about the record that will be built out in court as part of this lawsuit about the work we do being quite broad, and some of our most important work being adjudicative and legislative in nature, which is why, in 1935, the Humphreys Executive court, Supreme Court said, "This is a quasi-legislative and quasi-judicial body."

Sure, we've changed, but I think there's an important case to be made there. The other thing I'll stress is, if you look at Seila Law, which was one of the most recent cases, there's a lot of differentiation between the FTC, and that case was about the CFPB director at the time. The fact that we are a multi-member bipartisan body, there is something special that happens, something legitimating that occurs. There's a legitimating function. Is that a word? Yes, it is. That is a word, legitimating. That's a verb I can conjugate that way, in having this bipartisan expert body. So I feel good. I'm going to leave it at that though, so I don't get my lawyers annoyed at me.

Cristiano Lima-Strong:

No, that's certainly understandable. So you've touched on some of the practical realities of this limbo period where the president is attempting to fire you and Commissioner Slaughter. You all are challenging it and there's still ongoing business at the agency that you all were involved in. We, of course, are focused on the tech space. Wondering if you could talk a little bit about what do you see happening to some of the work, in terms of regulating, enforcing in the tech sector in this time where there's going to be an ongoing legal challenge to the president's attempt to fire you both.

Alvaro Bedoya:

Yeah. Let me point something out because I've had very significant differences with the new chairman, Andrew Ferguson, but there are definitely scenarios where we are shoulder to shoulder, on the same page. Probably foremost in that list is the need to hold Big Tech's feet to the fire, okay? And he has said, to his great credit, despite the fact that Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos were behind the president at the inauguration that he planned to bring it to Big Tech. I think he said it on Fox Business. And I thought, "Amen, that's fantastic." We're going to court with Meta around its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp next month, and so this is music to my ears. But here's the thing, Cristiano, in a world where the president can fire any commissioner, for any reason, at any time, it does not matter what Chairman Ferguson thinks and wants to do.

It doesn't matter what my colleague, Commissioner Holyoak, thinks and wants to do, because if a decree comes down from the White House or someone close to the president that says, "Hey, look, Jeff, Mr. Bezos has two cases that the FTC is litigating, it'd be pretty great if that was just one case, right? Why don't you knock one of those off the table? Why don't you settle it at a comfortable price for our friend." Right? Now, again, let me take a step back. I'm not alleging this has happened, but I think it would be foolish to not consider the real potential that this happens. And it doesn't matter if Chairman Ferguson wants to do it or not because he has a choice. Either he obeys or he doesn't obey. And I fear that what the president is trying to do to me is what president will try to do to him if he doesn't obey.

Now, someone listening might also say, "Well, Alvaro, why are you throwing around these accusations this way?" And again, I'm not accusing that Amazon is actually pulling these strings in this way with respect to the FTC. I do think it is quite extraordinary that when there is a rich record suggesting that Amazon warehouse workers suffer injury rates two X the industry average, that Senator Sanders issued a terrific report on this in mid-December, got lost in the transition. He alleged that Amazon workers who were injured went to the in-house company healthcare provider and it was a company policy to turn them away from outside referrals for 21 days, okay?

You can look in Reddit, and one of the things I like to do, I feel like maybe we talked about this at some point, I'm lurking in all sorts of Reddit forums and one of my favorite forums to lurk on is the Amazon fulfillment center forum. And I saw this worker talking about how, it was a picture of a vending machine that had PPE, but it also had not soda, not chips, but painkillers, okay? And the injuries that Amazon warehouses houses are so bad that their vending machine on the warehouse floor are stocked with painkillers. And the person who was posting about it actually said, "I'm out of my quantities," and I'll explain that in a second, "And I am screaming. My feet are killing me." Right? Now, amazon warehouse workers saw a thread I did on this online which, hilariously by the way, was one of the last public statements I made before I was fired.

I think that's an interesting coincidence. And some of them pointed out, "Hey, man, this stuff is free, but it's also capped." Right? And so just consider how many injuries you need to experience that you need to dole out painkillers on the warehouse floor and you need to cap the amount of Advil. And I'm not talking about opiates here. I'm talking about Advil and aspirin, you dole out on the warehouse floor, okay? And yet, and yet, after a million dollars from Amazon for the inauguration, after a, what I think it'd be fair to say, is a sweetheart deal for the first lady that the New York Post says, "Will result in $28 million of money that flows to her pockets." And I don't know if it's after Amazon made the deal to license The Apprentice, but after those first two things, the new head of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration is none other than a former Amazon safety executive.

So we would be forced to not ask questions about what's going to happen to these tech cases in a world where commissioners can be fired for any reason, at any time.

Cristiano Lima-Strong:

You've alluded to your Republican counterparts on the commission, Chair Andrew Ferguson and Commissioner Melissa Holyoak. They both issued statements after you disclosed Trump's attempt to fire you all, and they basically affirmed, Chair Ferguson said he has no doubts about the president's constitutional authority to do this. Commissioner Holyoak also said that she believes he has the Constitutional authority. What did you make of them backing up this attempt? And I'll note, you and Commissioner Slaughter have been removed from the FTC website. You've been listed as formers now.

Alvaro Bedoya:

Yes. Yes.

Cristiano Lima-Strong:

What do you make of the fact that Republican leadership is standing by the president in this regard, and what could that mean for some of the agency's activity going forward?

Alvaro Bedoya:

First of all, I don't care about the website. We've got an amazing public affairs team at the FTC and I don't want to put them in a position where either they listen to me, and me and Commissioner Slaughter, of course, very much think we are still FTC Commissioners, versus listening to the White House or Chairman Ferguson. They're just doing their jobs, and so I begrudge them, any of that. Although yes, it is funny to see an end date to my tenure when the attempt is very much illegal. And look, what do I make of Chairman Ferguson's statement? I will let your readers, I will lead your readers to the the same very interesting information I am aware of, which is when Senator Cantwell, Maria Cantwell asked then Solicitor General Andrew Ferguson, then the nominee to be Commissioner at the FTC, about what he thought about the for-cause removal protections that applied to FTC Commissioners under Humphreys Executor. I think this was question two in the questions for the records submitted as part of his nomination.

He squarely answered that he thought Humphreys Executor, look, it has been criticized, but it remains good law. And the Supreme Court has insisted that the only entity that can reverse the Supreme Court is the Supreme Court. And unless I've been asleep at the wheel here, I'm pretty sure the Supreme Court has not overruled Humphreys Executor in the intervening 90 years since it was issued in 1935. And so I don't mean to be too cute, but I agree with the Solicitor General Ferguson, that Humphrey’s Executor remains good law, and I'm looking forward to making that clear in court.

Cristiano Lima-Strong:

You've said, "We are still commissioners. We are challenging to have courts affirm this and to have this be known." I'm wondering, have you been in the building in FTC headquarters, since Tuesday?

Alvaro Bedoya:

Right.

Cristiano Lima-Strong:

Do you have access? If there's a vote that's called-

Alvaro Bedoya:

Right.

Cristiano Lima-Strong:

... have you thought about showing up? How are you dealing with that aspect of it?

Alvaro Bedoya:

Yeah, two things. First of all, let's talk about what I'm not doing and then talk about what I'm doing. So I can't get into my email, can't get in my calendar. Of course, I'm not going to put the security guard in the position where... need to either let me in the building and probably get in trouble with all sorts of folks or listen to the chairman, listen to the white... I'm not going to do that to those guys, okay? That's not what I'm about. But look, so how am I doing my job? My plan is to do two things. I have said, time and again, Commissioner Slaughter said, time and again, "This is not about us," okay? This is about the billionaires over President Trump's shoulder at the inauguration, and this is about protecting the extraordinary public servants at the FTC.

So what you're going to see from me are two things. First of all, I'm going to be out there telling the public about how amazing the FTC's work is. How, if you care about being able to afford your groceries, your prescription medicine, how, if you care about your kids' privacy, if you care about your privacy, you need to care about the FTC's ability to stay an independent agency. So right before we hopped on this interview, Cristiano, I got online and just did a 40-second video about our case against Amazon Alexa, where if you're a mom or dad, you may want to know that for years, Alexa kept recording, pardon me, kept recordings of your kids' voice forever. And that even when parents said, "No, no, no, I need you to delete that one recording," Alexa kept transcripts of it. And one thing I said in this video is, "Guys, just think, what does your kid need to say, for you as a parent, to stop and be like, 'Oh, we need to delete that.'?" And yet Amazon kept on holding onto those transcripts.

So you're going to see me telling telling, uh, and at the end of the video, I ask, "Hey, everyone, what's going to happen to cases like this in a world where billionaires hold ever more power? And in a world where the president could fire a commissioner for any reason, any time?" And I think that's a question people need to grapple with. The other thing I'm going to be doing, Cristiano, is being out there meeting with the wonky word that we use is market participants. But I'm going to be meeting with small business leaders. I'm going to be meeting with workers. I'm going to be meeting with consumers to find out the problems they're experiencing and lifting them up for the world. You do ask an interesting question, what if they start pulling back [inaudible], pulling back, settling cases for pennies on the dollar when, if Commissioner Slaughter and I were there, we would've stopped that? That is a question I'm spending a lot of time thinking about because that is something that keeps me up at night.

Cristiano Lima-Strong:

You've talked about using the bully pulpit and getting the message out, and talking about the agency's work. You were just in Denver at a rally with Senator Sanders and Representative Ocasio-Cortez.

Alvaro Bedoya:

Yes.

Cristiano Lima-Strong:

... talking about the agency's work. I think it's fair to say, it's not every day you see a FTC official standing on a platform in front of thousands of people, and you gave a very impassioned remarks about the agency's work. Talk a little bit more about the decision to do that and to make the case to the public in this moment.

Alvaro Bedoya:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I see my job right now as being telling the American people about the extraordinary humans at the FTC and why we need to let them keep on working in an independent agency. There's all sorts of just ugly things, wrong things, being said about my employees. You've got people who could, in a heartbeat, in a snap of the fingers, go work for a corporate law firm making 500,000, a million dollars a year, yet they believe in the work and stay on the job so they can fight fraud, so they can fight companies who think they could trap you and your kid, any moment, at any time, to keep hospitals from merging and driving up your hospital bills. And so when Senator Sanders' team reached out and said, "Hey, would you consider speaking at this rally?" It was an opportunity for me to tell tens of thousands of people about who the FTC is and how it was working for Colorado.

For example, in Colorado, we stopped the Kroger-Albertsons merger, and in each place in the country it means something different. In Colorado, it meant that there were these four separate supermarkets, and really they were two owned by one company, two owned by the other company, King Soopers, City Market, Albertsons and Safeway, that were all going to become one company. And there was a rich evidentiary record suggesting it was going to jack up prices for people in Colorado, and cut wages and jobs for the UFCW union workers in that state. And so any chance I have to tell the world, to tell taxpayers about how the FTC works for them, I am going to take.

Now, some people might say, "That was a political rally, Alvaro." In my speech, I addressed this squarely. This is not about Democrats versus Republicans. This is not about progressives versus conservatives. If it were, I would've not been on that stage. This is about whether this is going to be a country where we have rule of law versus a country where we have rule of billionaires. And that is something that left, middle, people who are totally checked out of politics, care about. And so that is why I did what I did, and yeah, you give me a bully pulpit to tell people about how amazing my employees are, I will take it seven days of the week. And it was quite an experience, but I think it's important to use that bully pulpit to tell the public about that work.

Cristiano Lima-Strong:

You're also touching on the ability to publicly express dissent. And that's a key piece here, which is that the FTC was poised to, likely soon, have a Republican majority. The president has appointed Mark Meador to serve on the agency. And so if, when confirmed that would give Republicans a three-two majority, if that had gone down, and now it's a situation where... I'm wondering if you could speak to, what is the significance of there potentially not being Democrats on the commission, which so Republicans could, in theory, with three do what they want anyway?

Alvaro Bedoya:

Yeah. Yeah.

Cristiano Lima-Strong:

What is the significance of having a minority member on the commission that can speak out?

Alvaro Bedoya:

Yeah, and I'm really grateful for the chance to answer this question because I want to make sure we don't answer it in terms of Democrat versus Republican, because if you're Republican, you need to care about this too, because eventually Democrats will be in the presidency again. And it's not just Republicans that have issues with money in politics and money in government. One of the things that really shocked me was, in the last election, when Vice President Harris refused to say that she would keep Chair Khan in office if she were elected. Say what you will about Chair Khan, what she did, the work she led at the FTC was wildly popular among an extraordinary cross section of Americans, right? We sued pesticides manufacturers, pardon me, brand pesticides manufacturers, crop control product makers who were trying to, in our view, anti-competitively, elbow out generics from the market.

Now, you're a farmer, you really care about your ability to get cheap crop control products, right? Under Chair Khan, we sued. We... suing John Deere for screwing over farmers and ranchers, and making it, locking down their software such that it's impossible to fix your own tractor, or even take it to the guy you know down the street who has fixed your family's tractors for generations. No, no, no, thanks to that software being locked down, you got to go take it to the dealership. And everyone knows that when you take a car, a vehicle to the dealership, you're going to pay more than when you take it to your local auto body shop. And so those are just two example. Subscription traps, we're trying to… and that ridiculous thing where you do two clicks, and you sign up for a subscription, and then you find that you need to spend an hour and a half on hold to cancel it over the phone. So this is the kind of stuff that Chair Khan did, wildly popular.

So, my wife is from Louisiana. I spend a lot of time down in Louisiana, particularly kids' spring breaks, kids' summer breaks. And let me tell you, I got a lot of Republican family members down there and I got a lot of really conservative family members down there. They ask me what I do, I tell them about those cases. There is not one person at the end of the conversation is, "Oh, yeah, that's great," and yet Vice President Harris would not sign on the dotted line. And what that's about, I'm afraid, is money in politics, is those billionaire donors who are contributing to her campaign. So why should you want a minority commissioner in office? In a world where the president can fire someone at any point, any time, I fear you're going to have those edicts come down from the White House of hey, go easy on this merger, hey... Or rather, go hard on that merger, right? Oh, hasn't been kind to us, why don't you shut that down?

In that world, the minority commissioner, whatever party the minority commissioner is going to be able to blow a whistle to stop that. They're going to be able to go to Capitol Hill. They're going to be able to warn the public about what might happen, and that's just one of any number of examples of why it's so important to have minority Commissioners there.

Cristiano Lima-Strong:

I know you've both spoken about this somewhat, but what's the concern level that we could see this happen, there have already been some firings at a number of agencies, that we could see this at other independent regulatory agencies like the Federal Communications Commission or others that are structured on a independent, bipartisan basis?

Alvaro Bedoya:

Some of the independent agencies have different levels of protections than we do. The National Labor Relations Board has, I forget, I haven't put the statute side by side, very comparable for-cause protections, if not the same for-cause protections. Other agencies have different protections, but like you mentioned, FCC, they look at mergers as well, right? They make critical decisions about spectrum, right? And so there is every reason to worry about a world where our political system, which is already soaked in billionaires' money, can reach down to those agencies and tell them to do X, or Y, or Z, regardless of whether you're a Democrat, or Republican, or Independent. It is the same concern, writ large, across the system, I would say.

Cristiano Lima-Strong:

You've talked about how certainly there was a lot of hope for bipartisanship on tech issues at the agency. We've heard some of the Republican leadership talk about this as well, but I think there's been a lot of attention on the enforcement side and perhaps less so on the regulatory side. Chair Ferguson just recently did an interview on CNBC where he talked about how he sees the FTC as a cop on the beat and not a regulator. A lot of the activity that the FTC has done in recent years has included rulemakings and other things, like the commercial surveillance rulemaking that started under Chair Khan's tenure. Wondering if you could talk about, are you concerned at all about some of those regulatory efforts to grapple with the power of the tech sector and major tech companies receding under the Trump administration? President Trump has been very vocal in talking about wanting to pare back the regulations and boost innovation in some of these sectors. So what might that look like, and does the direction there concern you?

Alvaro Bedoya:

So, am I worried that they're going to pare back on some of the regulations? Absolutely, and I am sympathetic. In this job, I've gotten to know a lot of small business owners, not just grocers and pharmacists who obviously deal with stuff that's life and death to be honest with you, your food, your health, but also entrepreneurs. One of the meetings that I had a couple of months ago was just with this entrepreneur group, more entrepreneur's organization. And what was really cool about this group is it was every kind of entrepreneur. You had people with landscaping businesses, you had people who were in construction, you had people who ran electronics businesses, TV, media companies, documentary filmmakers. And look, all of these are companies that probably have, that are not billionaire companies, right? They've got staffs of maybe five, or 10, or 15 people.

These are small businesses. And when those folks look at me and say, "Hey, Alvaro, we're not the biggest fans of regulation." I am sympathetic to that, right? But I would urge anyone to... And by the way, why am I sympathetic to it? Because who is really good at complying with regulations, or should be really good, or at least has the staff for it and doesn't sweat it that much? The billionaire companies, right? They're the ones who can have those legal offices of dozens or hundreds of people. They can hire those fancy law firms. It's the small businesses that get stuck with that annoying tab. But let's look at some of the rulemakings we're talking about, right? We have a rulemaking on noncompetes, but we preserve trade secrets, right? We preserve agreements to not go and poach your old employer's clients.

Our rulemaking on subscription fees, right? No one in that room, pardon me, on click-to-cancel, on subscription traps. That thing where you got to cancel over the phone, even though you sign up on the internet. No one in that room was like, "Oh, yes, that's really going to put a crimp in my style." These are not businesses that are trying to trap people in month-to-month subscriptions by putting them on hold for 90 minutes, right? These are people who are accountable to the communities that they operate in, the clients they have, because their clients are their neighbors. And if you trap your neighbor in a subscription trap, you're going to hear about it on the weekend when you're at soccer practice, right? And so I feel good about the rulemakings we've put out.

It would be a shame if Chairman Ferguson and my colleagues walked them back. My hope is that, look, and some of the rules were supported. I think our Junk Fees Rule came out 4-1, because we pared it back to just live events and travel. And so this idea that we were out there wielding this machete, regulatory, I don't know, whatever metaphor you want to pick, that we were out there just doing whatever the heck we wanted, I don't think aligns with reality. And so I'm hopeful that doesn't happen.

Cristiano Lima-Strong:

So, under the law, there can be no more than three members of the same party on the commission at the time. It does not explicitly state that the other members need to be members of the minority party.

Alvaro Bedoya:

Right.

Cristiano Lima-Strong:

So, one scenario that could happen here is that the president could appoint Independents to the vacancies he's trying to create by ousting you both. Does that concern you, that prospect that he will appoint a faux opposition?

Alvaro Bedoya:

That is absolutely a concern, and what I would say to that is, my reading of the Supreme Court cases about for-cause removal protections, but also bipartisan bodies, is that the reason a bipartisan body matters is for the conflict, right? It is for the sharpening of the opinions on both sides and strengthening the actions the commission takes regardless of whether or not you have agreement. I saw this time and again when we had Commissioner Wilson and Commissioner Phillips on the commission, that our work would be stronger because Commissioner Phillips, Commissioner Wilson, they are pretty darn smart. These are brilliant lawyers. Much as I occasionally disagree with them or disagree with them strongly, their presence made our work in the majority stronger because we had to reckon with their disagreements, and often, we made changes in response to it.

Look, most recently with then Commissioner Ferguson and then Commissioner Holyoak in the Junk Fees Rule and how it turned out, much pared down from its original offer. And so that would be such a shame if, quote, unquote, "Independents" were on the commission. Now, look, am I adverse to bona fide Independents being on the commission, people who are actually thinking for themselves? I'm not. One of the most extraordinary commissioners we had was Pamela Jones Harbour, and if I'm not mistaken, and I may be mistaken... It's been a week, Cristiano. I'm pretty sure she was an Independent. And let me tell you, there was a dissent in the Google/DoubleClick Matter that Commissioner Pamela Jones Harbour wrote, that I read about once every three or four months because it warned about this intersection of market power and commercial surveillance, that I frankly think we haven't quite fully reckoned with even today. So absolutely, look, bona fide Independent voices, amen. I'm all about it. Quote, unquote, "Independents" who are actually just agreeing and in lockstep with the majority, that's not what the American public needs to protect them.

Cristiano Lima-Strong:

I know we're coming up on time, so I just wanted to put it to you: what should folks in this space be watching for next here, and what should we expect from you all?

Alvaro Bedoya:

Let me suggest one thing to watch for and then one thing to do. In terms of things to watch for, I would look at what gets rolled back. If you think that Chairman Ferguson and Commissioner Holyoak are the only members of the current Federal Trade Commission, as they said they do, and as the president says he thinks, then they, in their eyes, have a majority that they can settle any case. They can either petition to modify a settlement or withdraw a settlement, if it's a commission settlement. There's all sorts of changes they can make, and so watch for those pulling back of lawsuits, of settlements, of orders, that kind of thing. And if you're hearing this and you're sympathetic to Commissioner Slaughter and myself, and more importantly the work of the FTC, take a moment and reach out.

If you have an FTC employee in your life, reach out to them. Reach out to any federal employee and just tell them what they mean to you, what their work means to you. These are people who get up in the morning and they think about protecting the American people. They don't think about oh, how am I going to make my next million? Where is my next beach house going to be, and what are the drapes going to be like in my sitting room? Right? These are people who get up and sue the Martin Shkrelis and Jeff Bezos of the world for pennies on the dollar of what they can make in the private sector. And yet they're getting emails, calling them low productivity and casting all sorts of aspersions on them. And let me tell you that for me, getting those little, tiny notes of support in my email, on social media, they matter. And I don't want that all to just be aimed at me and Commissioner Slaughter. I want the FTC employees out there and the federal servants out, the public servants out there to get those messages as well.

Cristiano Lima-Strong:

Alvaro, thank you so much for joining us and taking the time. I really appreciate it.

Alvaro Bedoya:

Thank you, Cristiano, and thank you, Tech Policy Press for the amazing work all of you do every day. It's terrific work, and I've been following it for some time.