The person who was just nominated to oversee and approve large mergers under the Trump administration is known a pragmatic America First conservative.
That man, Adam Candeub, reportedly could soon take over as assistant attorney general for the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division – and the Senate should approve him.
Candeub describes himself as a populist and is unafraid of taking on big corporate actors that raise prices or abuse consumers. However, at the same time, he has demonstrated a keen understanding of how, in other cases, stopping mergers for ideological reasons can hurt everyday Americans’ interests as well.
For example, the Biden Justice Department, under then-Attorney General Merrick Garland, sued to stop low-cost airline Spirit Airlines from merging with JetBlue. The merger would have saved Spirit, sparing 17,000 employees from losing their jobs and tens of thousands of consumers from seeing airfare price increases. Instead, the Biden administration chose to intercede, leading to the bankruptcy of the company last month and causing some plane tickets to soar by over 200 percent nearly immediately.
For more than 40 years, America’s antitrust policy was guided by the consumer welfare standard, which ensured that the only intervenes when mergers harm consumers directly. But in recent years, government regulators replaced the consumer welfare standard with a Neo-Brandeisian antitrust philosophy — one that opposes corporate mergers, even when they are in the consumers’ best interests.
While testifying to a Senate Judiciary Committee in 2023, Candeub defended economic freedom. He said the consumer welfare standard “limits potential bad effects of a mistaken or overly broad application of antitrust law.”
Candeub currently serves as the General Counsel (chief legal officer) of the Federal Communications Commission under Chairman Brendan Carr. There, he has overseen conservative victories such as ending the FCC’s promotion of DEI and deleting nearly 400 obsolete wireless regulations.
Candeub also heavily contributed to the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025” report. He authored the section on the Federal Trade Commission.
In one passage about conservative approaches to antitrust, Candeub wrote about the need “to trust markets, not government, to give people what they want” and made clear his desire for “market mechanisms, not political mechanisms.”
Democrats that sit on the Senate Judiciary Committee that have strong anti-business bents, like Cory Booker and Amy Klobuchar, continue looking to unwind the Trump administration’s commonsense antitrust negotiations and settlements. No doubt they will pressure the next Antitrust Division head nominee to do the same. Candeub’s endorsement of the consumer welfare standard suggests that he will not engage in such debates.
At the same time, however, the populist also made clear his desire to go after the corporate behemoths that harm consumer interests.
In the Project 2025 report, Candeub blasted practices such as Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) requirements at publicly traded corporations and endorsed antitrust law as a means of opening markets where needed. He also criticized Big Tech and led an effort to crack down on social media companies during Trump’s first term. He pushed to overhaul Section 230, which provides legal protections for when they censor conservatives or publish misinformation.
Candeub is the man for the job. Adam Candeub is uniquely qualified to lead the DOJ Antitrust Division due to his pioneering track record of dismantling Big Tech overreach. As a law professor, former FCC General Counsel, and Project 2025 contributor, he has redefined conservative competition policy by moving past narrow financial metrics to address how massive monopolies stifle free speech, corporate accountability, and small business growth.
When confirmed, Candeub's unique expertise in regulatory and constitutional law ensures he will aggressively prosecute the government's landmark ongoing monopoly cases against Google and Apple while aligning federal antitrust enforcement with a powerful populist agenda.
