On August 13, 2025, President Donald Trump revoked President Joe Biden’s sweeping signature executive order on competition (Executive Order 14036, July 9, 2021).  President Trump’s action fosters what the Justice Department has called an “America First Antitrust” approach that will “recalibrate and modernize the Federal approach to competition policy.”

Executive Order 14036, titled  “Executive Order on Promoting Competition in the American Economy,” according to President Biden, was designed to promote competition across the American economy.  The Executive Order’s goal was to provide a fair, open, and competitive marketplace and it contended that, after decades of consolidation, competition had weakened in various industries.  It laid out a “Whole-of-Government Competition Policy” that encouraged coordination of efforts by federal agencies with overlapping responsibilities for regulation and enforcement of antitrust laws.  It also created the White House Competition Council, led by various federal executive department leaders. 

Assistant Attorney General Abigail Slater of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division said “America First Antitrust focuses on empowering the American people in the free markets, not enabling regulators and bureaucrats to prescribe outcomes” and “[w]e are unleashing the new American Golden Age through antitrust enforcement that removes barriers to innovation and opportunity and limits regulatory burdens on free competition.”  FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson stated that the “now-withdrawn Executive Order encouraged top-down competition regulations, and established a flawed philosophical underpinning for the Biden-Harris Administration’s undue hostility toward mergers and acquisitions.”  Chair Ferguson also referenced President Trump’s April 9, 2025 Executive Order on Reducing Anti-Competitive Regulatory Barriers that directed Agencies to review rules and regulations that “reduce competition, entrepreneurship, and innovation” and claimed, consistent with the April 9 Executive Order, the FTC “is devoting its resources to enforcing the antitrust laws passed by Congress, for the benefit of all American consumers and workers.”

 It is unclear how the revocation of Executive Order 14036 changes how the  FTC and DOJ enforces antitrust laws.  The FTC and DOJ have already altered their approach to mergers and acquisitions, being far more receptive to structural remedies than the prior administration (e.g., UnitedHealth/Amedysis).  On the other hand, the two Agencies are still very much pursuing anticompetitive conduct outside of mergers, including an indictment of a sports executive for bid rigging, and the FTC created a “Joint Labor Task Force” to prioritize anticompetitive actions in labor markets.  The FTC is also conducting listening sessions on drug prices.  The Agencies seem to be trying to thread the needle of not getting in the way of conduct that could arguably be beneficial to consumers with stopping conduct that is more clearly harmful.