Op-Ed: Rep. Ryan Costello: President Trump's depoliticization of the FTC and SEC is welcome news

Looking back in the last four years of the Biden administration, one thing is clear: executive authority wasn’t employed to advance the American people, but to advance a partisan agenda with regulatory overreach. During my time in Washington, I watched federal agencies, tasked with objective governance, transform into political weapons — obstructing legitimate businesses, impeding competition, and using regulations as tools for activism.

Fortunately, President Donald Trump is taking action to undo this damage, and his Executive Order 14147, “Ending the Weaponization of the Federal Government,” captures his resolve to fix our government. Depoliticizing federal agencies is necessary to restoring trust in our government and getting these institutions working for the people, not for political elites.

For instance, take a look at President Joe Biden's gross abuse of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) to block the proposed merger between U.S. Steel and Nippon Steel. He utilized this obscure bureaucracy to gift a political win for the union leadership in Pennsylvania while leaving the steelworkers behind. This interference in a private commercial transaction was taken even after the Department of Defense stated no clear national security concerns, which is the only reason why CFIUS reviews exist. This clearly prioritized political agendas as President Biden was leaving office. When the government picks winners and losers based on political convenience rather than on market principles, it sets a dangerous precedent — one that the previous administration has exploited at every turn.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is another agency that was perverted under Biden’s watch. Startups, particularly those looking to exit through acquisitions, have faced mounting hurdles due to the administration’s overreach. The Biden administration’s broadening of Hart-Scott-Rodino Act’s merger notice requirements imposed on small businesses the costs and unnecessary bureaucracy of jumping through hoops. The FTC estimated that an extra 107 hours per filing totaling $350 million in additional labor costs would be necessary to comply with the new rules.

This can have devastating impacts on entrepreneurship and innovation. Business groups, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, correctly blasted this as an overextension of the FTC's powers as an affront to the very principle of separation of powers.

Under the previous chair Lina Khan, the FTC used meritless lawsuits based on weak theories of law, not to maintain equity in the marketplace, but as a means of asserting uncontrolled authority.

One such egregious example was the FTC's lawsuit in 2022 against a small Idaho based data broker named Kochava for allegedly selling geolocation data of users that visited what they termed “sensitive locations.” The timing of this litigation was not a mistake, it came in the same year as the Supreme Court overturned Roe vs Wade with the Dobbs decision. The term sensitive location, while not clearly defined in their litigation, was broadly understood to encompass any women’s health facility.

The Biden administration was so eager to manufacture headlines about them championing women’s rights that they weaponized federal agencies to grab headlines regardless of the weakness of their legal cases. Accordingly, the FTC resorted to litigation as a tool not to enforce the law — as per the FTC’s intended mandate — but to make political statements and create law, which again is not part of their mandate.

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has also not been spared from this political weaponization. The SEC has been tasked as a tool to push companies toward climate activism, rather than for adhering to its mandate of protecting investors. The agency's inherently flawed climate disclosure rules turned typical financial reporting into an activist tract. Even SEC Acting Chair Mark Uyeda warned that these regulations could harm the capital markets and the overall economy. And Biden and his colleagues went ahead anyway, pushing ideological agendas at the expense of economic prudence.

What we are witnessing is the entrenchment of the "Administrative State," where unelected bureaucrats exercise power with little accountability, shielded from political change. That is not how our government should be. I've seen firsthand the consequences of this unchecked power, and I know that reversing this tide is imperative. Happily, President Trump understands the stakes.

His initial step in de-weaponizing these agencies was the removal of FTC Democratic commissioners Alvaro Bedoya and Rebecca Slaughter. These commissioners were instrumental in driving Biden's legal weaponization campaign.

We need new FTC commissioners that must unwind destructive policies, drop politically motivated lawsuits that have targeted corporations, and reduce unnecessary regulations that have made growth and success for American entrepreneurs more difficult. Federal agencies must return to impartial arbiters, not partisan enforcers.

Rep. Ryan Costello represented Pennsylvania’s 6th District in Congress.