AS PRICES RISE, BIDEN TURNS TO ANTITRUST ENFORCERS

Lack of corporate competition target of recent efforts

As rising inflation threatens his presidency, President Joe Biden is turning to the federal government’s antitrust authorities to try to tame red-hot price increases that his administration believes are partly driven by a lack of corporate competition.

Biden has prodded the Agriculture Department to investigate large meatpackers that control a significant share of poultry and pork markets, accusing them of raising prices, underpaying farmers — and tripling their profit margins during the pandemic. As gas prices surged, he publicly encouraged the Federal Trade Commission to investigate accusations that large oil companies had artificially inflated prices, behavior that the administration says continued even after global oil prices began to fall in recent weeks.

The push has extended to little-known agencies, such as the Federal Maritime Commission, which Biden has urged to search for price gouging by large shipping companies at the heart of the supply chain.

The turn to antitrust levers stems from Biden’s belief that rising levels of corporate concentration in the U.S. economy have empowered a few large players in each industry to raise prices higher than a more competitive market would allow.

Corporate culpability for rising prices remains unclear. Inflation is at a 40-year high because of pandemicrelated factors such as broken supply chains and high demand for goods from consumers still flush with government-provided cash. But as the price increases have spread across sectors, including food and gasoline, the administration has come under increasing pressure to find ways to respond.

White House officials concede that their antitrust moves are unlikely to reduce costs for U.S. businesses or consumers immediately. The efforts, they say, will be more effective down the road. But the rise of inflation has given the White House an opportunity to take action that Democrats have long encouraged, and that Biden made an early focus of his tenure: using the power of government to break up monopolies and promote economic competition.

In July, before the recent run-up in prices, Biden issued an executive order that included 72 directives for Cabinet and independent agencies to more vigorously enforce antitrust laws and to pursue specific actions to promote competition, such as eliminating noncompete agreements for workers and forcing tech companies such as Apple to allow consumers to repair their own products.

He has also tapped antitrust crusaders for key roles, including Lina Khan to be chair of the FTC, and Jonathan Kanter, an adversary of Facebook and Google, to lead the antitrust division of the Justice Department. Tim Wu, a proponent of breaking up Facebook and other large companies, was brought on as a special White House adviser to Biden on competition issues.

White House officials say fighting inflation was not the initial motivation for Biden’s competition agenda. But, they say, the push has given him some of his most powerful tools to take action against rising prices, and it will play a central role in federal efforts to reduce costs for consumers over the long term.

That role could grow even more prominent if Democrats lose control of the House or Senate in next year’s midterm elections and Biden is forced to rely on executive actions to advance his economic agenda.

The administration’s focus on increasing competition “will spawn more innovation, more disruption, more startup businesses in the U.S.,” said Brian Deese, who heads the White House’s National Economic Council. And, he added, it “will deliver lower prices for Americans right away.”