Trump administration will keep Biden-era guidelines on mergers

It’s not often you can say things will remain status quo in President Trump’s second term, but this is one of them.

Both FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson and Omeed Assefi, acting assistant attorney general in the DOJ’s antitrust division, revealed the two enforcement agencies will keep the Biden-era guidelines for reviewing mergers. The two agencies jointly unveiled the set of guidelines at the end of 2023.

In a memo to FTC staff, Ferguson noted that merger guidelines work best for all stakeholders when both the FTC and DOJ are “singing from the same song sheet.” In the DOJ memo, Assefi said he “wholeheartedly agree[s]” that the guidelines work best when there is stability. He said the antitrust division “will continue to use the 2023 merger guidelines until further notice.”

Ferguson pointed to more than 30 years of history of new administrations maintaining guidelines from their predecessors. For instance, President Bill Clinton kept President George H.W. Bush’s 1992 guidelines when he took over the Oval Office, and President George W. Bush did the same with Clinton’s 1997 guideline updates.

“I think the clear lesson of history is that we should prize stability and disfavor wholesale rescission,” Ferguson wrote, adding that if “merger guidelines change with every new administration, they will become largely worthless to businesses and the courts.”

Ferguson also noted that keeping the revised guidelines is good for FTC and DOJ.

“The wholesale rescission and reworking of guidelines is time consuming and expensive,” he wrote. “We should undertake this process sparingly. We have limited resources to patrol the beat and constant turnover undermines agency credibility.”

CNBC reported that the decision is “a blow to Wall Street,” which has largely anticipated a deregulatory attitude from Trump 2.0 that would in turn be a boon to the M&A market.