New FTC Chair Fighting DEI, Cuts Off Public Comments on Surveillance Pricing

While Lina Khan spent much of her four years at the head of the Federal Trade Commission fighting to break up monopolies and combat price gauging, it appears Donald Trump’s new FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson has zeroed in on a singular supposed cause for all of the economic problems: DEI. Sitting Commissioner Alvaro Bedoya doesn’t think that’s going to do the trick, and in a fiery dissent to Ferguson’s war on diversity, highlighted a number of issues the FTC was working on but has now closed off the public’s ability to comment on.

Per Bedoya’s statement, in which he described Ferguson as “uninterested in the challenges that regular human beings face,” he pointed to five requests for information that the FTC had asked for public input on. That included a question as to how the Commission could protect workers from illegal business practices like noncompetes and no-pouch clauses, combat predatory pricing, and help small businesses.

Perhaps most notably, Ferguson shut down comments on a request regarding surveillance pricing practices, including looking into how companies collect and trade upon people’s personal data and use that information to set different prices for products.

The practice has become increasingly commonplace, especially online, where companies have access to a wealth of user data as a person shops around for goods and services. It’s a practice that might be most associated with airplane tickets—for years, it has been believed that airlines change prices based on how often a consumer looks at a flight. But a recent FTC study, published just before the Biden administration ended, found that the practice is much more widespread. Former FTC Chair Khan warned that companies were setting “targeted, tailored prices for goods and services” based on everything “from a person’s location and demographics, down to their mouse movements on a webpage.”

That seems like just the kind of thing the FTC should look into. Alas, it’s apparently no longer on the agenda. Commissioner Bedoya stated in his dissent that Ferguson’s focus on DEI is “a game for retweets on X—the kind of stunt that infuriates regular people who cannot make rent.” Certainly, the path to alleviating the growing cost of living that is increasingly pushing Americans into debt and poverty does not seem like it would go through X. But who knows, maybe if Ferguson can rack up enough engagement, he can split his revenue sharing check with the American people.