President Donald Trump’s sudden and unlawful firing of the Federal Trade Commission’s two remaining Democrats will serve the tech billionaires who backed him, not the American people, warned one of the ousted officials today.
“I think we need to be focused on the billionaires over President Trump’s shoulder at his inauguration and what this attempt will do for them,” Commissioner Alvaro Bedoya said in some of his first live remarks since the firing, at a hearing before the Colorado state legislature. “Above all else, we need to be asking ourselves, who will win from this attempt to illegally remove us, and frankly, who will lose?”
Bedoya and his fellow Democratic Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter were both fired by Trump on Tuesday evening in what they call an illegal removal from an independent agency. Trump’s move appears to violate the law and a longstanding Supreme Court precedent preventing the president from firing commissioners without cause. In an interview with CNBC on Wednesday, Slaughter warned that their firings are a warning for other government entities that are supposed to be independent. “If I can be fired, I don’t know why Jerome Powell can’t be fired,” she said, referring to the chair of the Federal Reserve.
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Even though Bedoya and Slaughter would have served in the minority on the FTC, they’ve stressed that such a position is still critical for holding corporations to account. The agency’s current Republican chair Andrew Ferguson, however, is readily willing to cede more power to the president. As head of the executive branch, Ferguson said in a statement Tuesday, Trump “is vested with all of the executive power in our government. I have no doubts about his constitutional authority to remove Commissioners, which is necessary to ensure democratic accountability for our government.”
Trump hasn’t made his specific reasons for the firings clear, especially since Republicans will soon have a majority on the panel anyway. White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said in a statement that Trump “has the lawful authority to manage personnel within the executive branch. President Trump will continue to rid the federal government of bad actors unaligned with his common sense agenda the American people decisively voted for.”
Bedoya voiced his own suspicions. “I think it’s interesting that the last public statement I made was critical of one of the men standing behind the President’s shoulder at his inauguration,” Bedoya told the Colorado legislators — referring to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, one of numerous Big Tech CEOs that prominently attended the event.
“It’s interesting that the last public statement I made was critical of one of the men standing behind the President’s shoulder at his inauguration”
“I issued a statement criticizing Mr. Bezos for working his people and warehouses so fast, so hard that they literally have to put up vending machines on the warehouse floor, dispensing and capping the amount of painkillers each of those workers has to get.” He added that he’s “not alleging that this was why I was fired, but I think it’s an interesting coincidence.”
Bedoya’s statements were made at what had been originally scheduled as a presentation about the states’ role in protecting Americans’ affordability of goods and cost of living.
Bezos isn’t the only CEO that stands to gain from Democratic commissioners’ dismissals, Bedoya warned. Three of the tech executives who attended Trump’s inauguration — Amazon’s Bezos, X owner Elon Musk, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg — each run a company that is subject to a court order or litigation from the FTC.
While Trump has railed against “Big Tech,” the FTC recently removed guidance on its website that was critical of Amazon, Microsoft, and others. It asked to delay a consumer protection trial over Amazon’s Prime service due to staffing losses before abruptly reversing course.
“I think we need to take a step back and ask ourselves, who will win from this effort to remove us?”
“I am sitting as a judge in a matter in which FTC staff is trying to tighten and ramp up the privacy protections for Meta users,” Bedoya said. “I am responsible for enforcing a 20-year privacy consent decree against the company most of us know as Twitter. And I am suing Amazon, Mr. Bezos’ company, in not one, but two separate lawsuits. So I think we need to take a step back and ask ourselves, who will win from this effort to remove us?”
More than two dozen Democratic senators, including Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Dick Durbin (D-IL), and Maria Cantwell (D-WA), sent a letter to Trump urging him to reverse his dismissals. “This action contradicts long standing Supreme Court precedent, undermines Congress’s constitutional authority to create bipartisan, independent commissions, and upends more than 110 years of work at the FTC to protect consumers from deceptive practices and monopoly power,” they wrote. “We urge you to rescind these dismissals so the FTC can get back to the people’s work.”
But Bedoya made a point to “stress an uncomfortable fact, which is that the issue of the corrupting influence of money in politics, I don’t think, is limited to one party.” He noted that former Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris did not commit to naming President Joe Biden’s FTC Chair Lina Khan to lead the agency again, as big business donors criticized her aggressive approach to merger enforcement, among other things. By contrast, Vice President JD Vance has actually praised Khan in the past — though that obviously didn’t lead to maintaining her position as chair. “Frankly, I think that has more than anything to do with the amount of money and big money donors that we’re giving to her campaign,” Bedoya said. “Chair Khan’s policies were wildly popular in rural America, urban America, suburban America, red, blue, you name it.”
“This issue of the corrupting influence of billionaires in law enforcement is an issue that affects all of us,” Bedoya said.
