USA Trends and Developments Contributed by: Bradley Justus, Lisl Dunlop, Josh Jowdy and Sandhya Taneja, Axinn, Veltrop & Harkrider LLP
people into castes on the basis of immutable characteristics”. Chair Ferguson immediately terminated internal DEI initiatives at the FTC, and has since launched a Labor Markets Task Force to investigate potential collusion concerning DEI metrics. Practitioners should be prepared for potential scrutiny of DEI initiatives. Practitioners should also be prepared for scru - tiny of environmental, social and governance (ESG) policies as well. Outside the merger con - text, in May 2025, the FTC and DOJ filed a joint statement of interest supporting a competition complaint brought by Republican state attor - neys general related to investment strategies weighing ESG policies of public businesses. The suit alleges that large institutional investors BlackRock, State Street and Vanguard, utilise ESG-sensitive investment strategies to collude to decrease outputs for several competing ener - gy providers, and correspondingly increase fuel prices for American consumers. As of May 2025, the enforcement action remains pending.
Additionally, at the DOJ, Assistant Attorney General Slater has noted a particular regulatory interest in social media platforms, due to their perceived power to censor or otherwise affect political speech. Slater has decried that powerful online platforms can not only “control prices and exclude competition” but also control ”the flow of our nation’s commerce and communication”, and “are key not only to the ordinary citizen’s free expression, but also to how elections are won or lost, and how our news is disseminated or not”.
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