Staffing at antitrust regulator declines under Donald Trump

Phone directories show number of justice department officials scrutinising mergers has fallen

Staffing in the antitrust division of the US Department of Justice has fallen since Donald Trump took office despite a boom in big corporate mergers, according to phone directories for the division.

The directories showed a 13 per cent drop across the division since February 2017, shortly after Mr Trump’s inauguration, with more severe attrition in units responsible for civil and criminal enforcement of competition laws.

Across the six units that review mergers, the directories showed 18 per cent fewer trial attorneys, paralegals, and other support staff. In two Washington-based units that investigate criminal price-fixing conspiracies, the decline was 27 per cent.

David Cicilline, Democratic chair of the House antitrust subcommittee, called the staffing decline “alarming” and said the subcommittee would look into it.

“We need to both modernise our existing antitrust laws and make sure that they’re working in the current economy, and also ensure that antitrust agencies have the resources and personnel to do their work effectively,” he said in a statement.

The figures highlighted how the enforcement capabilities of some parts of the US government have eroded under Mr Trump, who has restricted hiring as part of an effort to reduce costs among federal agencies.

The division appeared to have shrunk even as Democrats, and some Republicans, have raised concerns about corporate power and questioned whether competition authorities should do more to restrain big companies.

The phone directories may not precisely reflect staffing in the division, as employees may have left or joined without the directory being immediately updated.

However, the decline in phone directory listings corresponded with comments from several former attorneys in the division and antitrust lawyers who regularly represent clients before the justice department.

One said staffing in parts of the division appeared “markedly lower” than when Mr Trump took office, while another said staff numbers in certain units seemed “down substantially”.

A senior justice department official said the antitrust division had “not shrunk at all, I don’t think”. Later, a department spokesperson said: “We question whether your numbers are accurate because they include both attorneys and certain support staff.”

The justice department declined to provide its own figures for the number of attorneys and other staff employed in the antitrust division currently and at the beginning of the Trump administration.

Just days after Mr Trump was inaugurated in January 2017, he issued a hiring freeze across the executive branch, including the Department of Justice. Though the freeze was officially lifted in April 2017, the justice department has continued to operate under constraints.

“We have a number of new hires coming in the next several months,” said the justice department spokesperson. Some are from the department’s honours programme for law school graduates, according to the spokesperson, while in other cases the division has been “granted exceptions to the hiring freeze”.

Since September 2017, the justice department’s antitrust chief has been Makan Delrahim, a former intellectual property lawyer and lobbyist who previously served in the antitrust division in the early 2000s.

He has been best known for his controversial attempt to block AT&T’S $80bn takeover of Time Warner, which owned CNN, the target of frequent criticism by Mr Trump. Mr Delrahim has denied any political motive in his decision. In June, a judge in Washington allowed the deal to go ahead and an appeal is pending.