On Thursday, March 27, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) Antitrust Division announced the launch of a new Anticompetitive Regulations Task Force to identify and eliminate anticompetitive state and federal laws and regulations, with a particular emphasis on the transportation and energy industries, among others. As part of this initiative, the DOJ has opened a 60 day public comment period for market participants, trade groups, and others “to identify unnecessary laws and regulations that raise the highest barriers to competition.” The public comment period will close on May 26.
Task Force Will Identify “Unnecessary Regulatory Burdens”
The DOJ task force comes in the wake of two executive orders issued by President Trump shortly after he took office in late January 2025. In a January 31 Executive Order, the President directed that federal agencies should seek to “alleviate unnecessary regulatory burdens placed on the American people.” Then on February 19, President Trump signed an Executive Order requiring agencies to “initiate a process to review all regulations” and identify regulations that, among other things, “impose undue burdens on small businesses and impede private enterprise and entrepreneurship.”
In support of this effort, the DOJ announced its newly-formed Anticompetitive Regulations Task Force will “initiate a public inquiry to identify unnecessary laws and regulations that raise the highest barriers to competition,” with a particular focus on “markets that have the greatest impact on American households,” i.e. housing, transportation, food and agriculture, healthcare, and energy. After the 60 day public comment period has closed, the task force will review those comments and bring together a team of attorneys, economists, and other Antitrust Division staff to identify state and federal laws and regulations that unnecessarily harm competition and take appropriate action to work with state and federal agencies to revise or eliminate these regulations.
Prior DOJ Statements on Unnecessary Regulation
In announcing the formation of its Anticompetitive Regulations Task Force, the DOJ noted its “long history of serving as the Executive Branch’s chief competition advocate by working with agencies to identify and eliminate unnecessary regulations.” The DOJ’s announcement cited in particular the agency’s 2018 report following a roundtable discussion on “Competition & Deregulation,” which identified a number of ways in which regulations harm competition. That roundtable and subsequent report reviewed antitrust exemptions and immunities; antitrust consent decrees; and consumer costs imposed by anticompetitive regulations and identified a number of actions that could be taken to reduce unnecessary regulatory burden on markets.
Among the burdensome regulations identified in the 2018 report were state laws and regulations concerning new car dealerships, which “have been shown to cause higher retail prices and higher distribution costs, at the expense of both consumers and manufacturers— particularly U.S. carmakers.” For example, according to a 2010 paper in the Journal of Economic Perspectives entitled “State Franchise Laws, Dealer Terminations, and the Auto Crisis” by economists Francine Lafontaine and Fiona Scott Morton, these state laws and regulations can incentivize dealers “to increase their ‘list’ prices for repairs. If warranty markups are high enough, they can allow what would normally be unprofitable dealerships to remain in business.” In other words, because warranty work paid for by the manufacturer is the dealer’s single largest source of business for its service department, these state laws and regulations discourage dealers from competing for customer-paid repair work; instead, dealers are encouraged to extract the highest possible retail prices from nonwarranty customers in order to goose their warranty reimbursement rates, even if that means sacrificing customer-paid work from more price-sensitive customers who divert their business to lower-cost independent repair shops once their vehicles are no longer covered by warranty.
Emerging Consensus on Competition Policy?
With the announcement of the Anticompetitive Regulations Task Force, it appears the DOJ Antitrust Division will pick up where the previous Trump Administration left off in identifying and working to eliminate anticompetitive regulations. President Trump’s most recent emphasis on seeking ways to reduce regulatory burden on free market competition in some ways echoes President Biden’s July 2021 executive order directing federal agencies to exercise their authority to promote competition and curtail perceived market abuses. Moreover, while new leadership at the DOJ Antitrust Division and Federal Trade Commission seem likely to restore the consumer welfare standard as the governing standard for antitrust enforcement policy, they appear equally likely to continue applying a heightened scrutiny to proposed transactions in heavily consolidated industries, and show no signs of backing down on aggressive antitrust enforcement, including monopolization cases against Big Tech companies now hurtling toward trial in 2025.
