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Lina Khan has warned of “catastrophic consequences” for America if Donald Trump’s antitrust officials fail to scrutinise private equity groups that are buying up chunks of the US economy.
The recently resigned chair of the US Federal Trade Commission told the Financial Times that private equity groups posed a threat to the country’s healthcare system.
Given “the stakes of our healthcare markets, it’s extraordinarily important that we are staying vigilant here”, said Khan.
“If enforcers want to decide that they want to look the other way, that’s going to have, I fear, catastrophic consequences for Americans.”
Wall St has cheered the departure of the aggressive trustbuster, a member of a new generation of progressive officials appointed by Joe Biden who cracked down on anti-competitive conduct across the US economy from Big Tech to private equity. After stepping down as FTC chair on Monday, Khan warned against reverting to what she sees as lax antitrust enforcement that for decades let businesses grow unchecked.
Khan cautioned that “in our democracy right now there is an open question” on whether “monopolists in extraordinarily powerful firms are going to be able to corrupt the political process and interfere with legitimate law enforcement”.
Her comments echo the alarm sounded by Biden during his farewell address, in which he warned that an “oligarchy is taking shape in America” that risks damaging democracy. Biden railed against an emerging “tech industrial complex” for holding a “dangerous concentration” of wealth and power in the country.
His speech was broadly seen as a broadside against business magnates who have cozied up to US President Donald Trump, including Tesla boss Elon Musk and other Big Tech CEOs.
Tech chief executives, including Musk, Amazon executive chair and founder Jeff Bezos and Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, sat in prominent seats in front of the president’s cabinet nominees at Trump’s inauguration this week.
Amazon and Meta, whose FTC trials will begin in October 2026 and April, respectively, each donated $1mn to Trump’s inaugural fund, alongside other tech groups.
Big Tech was a critical pillar of Khan’s agenda. She launched an investigation into Microsoft’s cloud business as well as an inquiry into the partnerships between cloud providers and generative AI companies.
In private equity, a key focus was roll-ups in the healthcare sector. She argued that these roll-ups — in which companies purchase and merge several businesses in the same sector — and “strip and flip” models — where the acquired groups’ assets are sold off — often leave those businesses indebted and weakened.
“I heard a flood of concern from healthcare workers, from ER doctors . . . about the private equity roll-ups that were resulting in worse quality care, higher prices,” Khan said.
“These are just market realities that are not going away,” she added.
Just days before Khan’s resignation, the FTC reached a settlement with Welsh, Carson, Anderson, and Stowe that limits the buyout group’s involvement with a business it created that has acquired more than a dozen anaesthesiology practices in Texas. The FTC alleged the deals were aimed at raising prices and quashing competition.
Welsh Carson said it reached the agreement — which includes no admission of wrongdoing or monetary penalties — after the FTC “threatened to re-litigate” in its in-house court claims that were dismissed by a federal judge last year.
Khan has also ordered JAB Holdings to divest vet clinics as a condition for two proposed acquisitions that the agency said could have created monopolies. JAB has said the outcome of discussions with the regulator “was in line with what we anticipated”.
But not all FTC cases have come to an end, and the new administration has the power to withdraw or soften challenges launched by Khan.
The ex-chair argued that companies facing FTC trials were trying to get a better deal from Trump’s administration.
“This type of jostling is something that we’re all seeing in clear display,” said Khan.
