By Jody Godoy
(Reuters) -Two people working with billionaire Elon Musk on a bid to radically shrink the U.S. government have started work at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, the agency tasked with enforcing antimonopoly laws and fighting consumer fraud by companies.
Gavin Kliger, who was part of the team that arrived at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in February a week before it started terminating staff, and Emily Bryant are the staffers from the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which President Donald Trump set up to slash the federal bureaucracy.
FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson “supports the president’s agenda to cut out waste fraud and abuse in the federal government,” FTC spokesperson Joe Simonson said.
Their arrival will likely cheer the FTC’s detractors within the business community, who have criticized the agency and its counterpart, the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division, for continuing cases brought under President Joe Biden and called for the enforcers to be reined in under Trump.
Trump has tasked Ferguson and his DOJ counterpart, Assistant Attorney General Gail Slater, with taking on Big Tech. Both have signaled that they share some of their predecessors’ concerns about how anticompetitive practices harm consumers and innovation and said they will not back down from challenging illegal monopolies and mergers.
It was not immediately clear what actions the DOGE staffers would propose at the FTC.
Bryant and Kliger, a Berkeley-educated computer scientist who has boosted white supremacists and misogynists online, arrived at the agency around three weeks after the White House sparked controversy and a lawsuit by firing the FTC’s two Democratic commissioners.
Fallout at the FTC from Trump administration cost-cutting has so far been limited.
An FTC attorney in March said at a court hearing that resource constraints could affect a consumer protection case against Amazon, a claim the agency subsequently denied.
Constitution Center, the Washington building where most FTC staff work, was initially on a list of leases to be terminated, which would have required the agency to move by June.
Ferguson successfully advocated to reverse that decision, though he said that an eventual move or “substantial alteration to our existing floor plan” would eventually be necessary, according to a March 18 internal memo seen by Reuters.
The FTC is days away from a trial against Meta Platforms, where the agency alleges the social media platform bought Instagram and WhatsApp to crush emerging competition. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been meeting with White House officials in recent weeks. The Wall Street Journal reported Zuckerberg was lobbying Trump to settle the case.
(Reporting by Jody Godoy in New York, Editing by Rosalba O’Brien)
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