President Joe Biden directed government agencies to craft new regulations aimed at fostering competition in business and labor markets, a rebuke of a 40-year path that he said diminished the country’s economic growth, drove down investment, and led to fewer small businesses.
“The heart of American capitalism is a simple idea: open and fair competition,” Biden said before signing an executive order with dozens of proposed actions for federal agencies at the White House on Friday.
Surrounded by members of his Cabinet, including Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, Attorney General Merrick Garland, and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Biden declared, “Competition works.”
“Fair competition is what made America the wealthiest, most innovative nation in history,” he said. “That’s why people come here to invent things and start new businesses.”
BIDEN UNVEILS EXECUTIVE ORDER TO ‘PROMOTE COMPETITION’ THROUGH 72 INITIATIVES
The order, Biden explained, would push companies to attract consumers through innovation, instead of wielding monopoly power, and allow consumers to make better informed decisions.
“Forty years ago, we chose the wrong path, in my view, following the misguided philosophy of people like Robert Bork and pulling back on enforcing laws to promote competition. … We’re now 40 years into the experiment of letting giant corporations accumulate more and more power,” Biden said. “What have we gotten from it? Less growth. Weakened investment. Fewer small businesses.”
The president touted specific measures, including the order’s support for banning noncompete clauses for employees.
“Workers should be free to take a better job if someone offers,” Biden said. “If your employer wants to keep you, he or she should have to make it worth your while to stay.”
He called this “the kind of competition that leads to better wages and greater dignity of work.”
Biden suggested competition laws could be used to hold big businesses accountable to consumers and workers, improving outcomes for both.
“Rather than competing for consumers, they are consuming their competitors. Rather than competing for workers, they’re finding ways to gain the upper hand on labor,” Biden said, swiping at corporate behemoths fostered in giant mergers.
The White House has emphasized the potential to challenge past mergers, writing in a fact sheet that the order “recognizes that the law allows [the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission] to challenge prior bad mergers that past Administrations did not previously challenge.”
Labor allies praised the order’s support for banning noncompete clauses and obstructive licensing requirements, among other actions.
The order sends a “clear message” to workers “that this White House is committed to creating a level playing field,” said Marc Perrone, president of United Food and Commercial Workers International. Perrone, who was in attendance at the White House on Friday, leads the country’s largest private-sector union, a constituency to whom Biden has made open appeals.
Moves designed to increase pricing transparency and access to medicines and medical devices outlined in the directive were praised by activists on the Left and the Right.
David Sirota, once a top campaign aide to Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent, said in a tweet that guidance calling for the Food and Drug Administration to work with states and tribes to import prescription drugs from Canada was “the result of 20+ years of grassroots pressure and organizing.”
Calling price transparency a “bipartisan issue,” Cynthia Fisher, a prominent patient’s rights advocate, said in a statement that “President Biden’s order unleashes competition and gives power to consumers to drive down the costs of healthcare and coverage.”
Still, some urged longer-term solutions for measures of which they approved, criticizing others as anti-competitive.
“We’d prefer them enacted legislatively,” said Alfredo Ortiz, president of the Job Creators Network, a business lobby group created by Bernard Marcus, co-founder of Home Depot, of actions to slash occupational licensing red tape and boost healthcare price transparency.
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Other provisions, such as regulating in-flight Wi-Fi fees or internet termination, are a difficult sell, and Ortiz predicted that Biden’s policy “grab bag” would have “mixed results.”
“Biden is talking out both sides of his mouth on promoting competition, signing today’s executive order while also pushing for historic tax and regulatory increases that would significantly harm America’s competitive, free-market economy,” Ortiz said in a statement Friday.
