EXCLUSIVE — Federal Trade Commission Commissioner Mark Meador said the populist shift that has transformed the Republican Party in recent years is a permanent change, not just a passing phase in electoral politics.
Meador, an antitrust lawyer and Trump appointee who was confirmed to his post at the commission in April, sat down with the Washington Examiner for an interview in his office on Friday. Meador has no qualms with challenging big corporations, a change from Republicans before him.
As a Republican FTC commissioner, Meador, 40, represents a departure from the consumer welfare standard, which guided U.S. antitrust policy for decades, toward a more populist approach to the FTC.
He said that the populist wave in the GOP, which swept Trump into office, is not going to recede.
“I don’t think it’s the case that everyone agrees on everything — that’s obviously not true — but I don’t see really any chance that we just revert back to the way that we were doing things in 2008,” Meador said. “There are so many things that have changed.
“In the economy, in our political base — the party has very rightly, in my view, taken a turn to consider the interests and concerns of the working class, and I think that’s a critical effort, and we need to encourage that.”
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Meador was born in Indiana. He attended the University of Chicago and later received a law degree from the University of Houston. Meador came to the FTC from private practice and previously served as deputy chief counsel for antitrust and competition policy for Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT). He also worked as a trial attorney in the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division during Trump’s first term.
The Senate confirmed Meador to the FTC in a 50-46 vote along party lines.
Meador’s antitrust policy vision can be distilled down into the adage that “big is bad,” as he laid out in a paper shortly after entering office. While Democrats on the commission have traditionally been seen as skeptical of big business and Wall Street but open to bigger government, Republicans usually fell in the other bucket — distrusting big government while being more favorable to Wall Street.
Meador is working to break that mold. He sees both big government and big business as unhealthy for the country and for competition.
Meador emphasized that, historically, conservatives have been very good at pointing out the dangers of big government and concentrated political power, but less so at identifying the problems caused by the influence of private companies.
“We don’t hesitate to say that’s bad and dangerous and we need to be worried, but for some reason, when it comes to concentrated economic power, suddenly, ‘Oh well, that’s fine,’” Meador said.
He said, though, that it is not illegal to be big, even if it is illegal to maintain that size through certain forms of conduct.
“But when something is big, our sort of Spidey sense should kick in, right?” Meador said.
“Like, we should be more concerned and attentive to the potential risks there and ensuring that we’re not letting some political ideology distract us from a genuine threat that can harm people.”
Meador has also not shied away from going after Big Tech. Prior to joining the board, he branded Google a “monopolist.” He also supports legislation that the industry is lobbying to stall, such as the Kids Online Safety Act, a bipartisan bill designed to protect children from harmful online content. It would create a “duty of care,” meaning that companies would have to actively “prevent and mitigate” their exposure to content that could be viewed as harmful, for instance, content that promotes self-harm, suicide, eating disorders, and drug use.
Meador said during the interview that many of the issues with concentrated economic power have, in part, been driven by the behavior of the biggest technology companies in the United States.
Meador said that, as the internet exploded in the 2000s and early 2010s, there was a pervasive mindset, or even a consensus view, among regulators that technology evolves rapidly and that it was better not to stand in the way of innovation and progress. Because of that, the government took a light-touch approach, which resulted in a mixed record at best and caused a lot of harm, he said.
“We’ve seen several companies consolidate in their own markets and amass immense amounts of economic power,” Meador said.
For instance, companies such as Amazon, Google, and Facebook, now Meta, grew during that time to become the biggest corporations in the world while buying competitors. Google acquired YouTube in 2006, and Facebook purchased Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014. Amazon became a retail giant during that time.
The commissioner said that while he doesn’t think the FTC should micromanage the tech sector or internet economy, it should not ease up on enforcement and assume the free market will work everything out.
“The free market only functions when we have competition, and that’s our job, is to ensure that we have competition,” he said. “So as we look ahead to all the new technologies that are coming into play, including with AI, we don’t want to regulate that. We don’t want to get in the way of natural technological development, but we also want to make sure that competition is protected.”
Meador also discussed corporate mergers. One role that the FTC, alongside the Justice Department, plays is reviewing large mergers and acquisitions to ensure they do not harm competition.
Meador said most mergers are not bad and can help consumers but emphasized that some are anticompetitive. He said that during the Biden administration, under “hipster antitrust” proponent Lina Khan, there was a view that most mergers were bad.
One of the most highly publicized mergers that the FTC has blocked in recent years was the Kroger-Albertsons merger, which would have combined thousands of grocery stores across the country. The move was blocked in 2024.
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He said that the FTC in the second Trump administration is trying to avoid the two extremes and “chart a path down the middle.”
“Many of them, if not most, are often good and helpful to consumers, but there are some that raise serious concerns, and when those concerns are present, we won’t hesitate to step in and defend consumers to protect their interests and stop anti-competitive mergers,” Meador said.
