Antitrust laws are regulations that encourage competition by limiting the market share of corporations. This often involves ensuring that mergers and acquisitions don't overly concentrate market power or form monopolies, as well as breaking up firms that have become monopolies. Many Americans believe that during the past 30-40 years, our economy has been rigged against American consumers. Critics claim corporate lobbying has unduly influenced our representatives, making them less responsive to their constituents and allowing firms to “concentrate” their market power at the expense of consumers and small businesses. They say illegal corporate collusion has drastically reduced real competition between “competitors” and resulted in many de-facto monopolies.

Among others, our healthcare, petroleum, agriculture, airline, telecom and tech industries have all been accused of gaming the system in favor of increased profits. They claim collusion exists among the providers of most of the products and services upon which American consumers depend. The Justice Department’s antitrust division and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) are the government’s two antitrust enforcers but they have not been aggressive or effective enough to protect the American marketplace from corporate greed. Consumer advocates say this has gone on long enough.

Pending Legislation: S.130 - Competition and Antitrust Law Enforcement Reform Act of 2025
Sponsor: Sen. Amy Klobuchar (MN)
Status: Senate Committee on the Judiciary
Chair: Sen. Chuck Grassley (IA)

• I oppose reforming current antitrust reform policy and wish to donate resources to the campaign committee of Leader John Thune (SD).
• I support overhauling antitrust laws, making it harder to merge, stronger against anticompetitive actions (like dominance abuse and monopsonies), boosting enforcement (penalties, new FTC office), banning forced arbitration for antitrust, providing whistleblower rewards, and aiming for greater market competition and consumer protection by:
  
  1.) Prohibiting mergers that create even an "appreciable risk" of reducing competition or creating monopsonies (single buyers with power) and shifting the burden to merging parties to prove the merger isn't harmful for large deals.
  
  2.) Granting the FTC and DOJ stronger tools, including the ability to seek significant civil monetary penalties for violations.
  
  3.) Establishing an Office of the Competition Advocate within the FTC and creating whistleblower protections with financial rewards for reporting antitrust violations.
  
  4.) Adding a standard to target conduct by dominant firms that harms competition, moving beyond just "consumer welfare".
  
  5.) Making predispute arbitration and joint-action waivers in antitrust disputes invalid.
  
  And wish to donate resources to the campaign committee of Sen. Chuck Grassley (IA) and/or to an advocate group currently working with this issue.