Antitrust Law Daily Wrap Up, ANTITRUST NEWS: FTC Commissioner Meador invokes Theodore Roosevelt in call for ‘America First Antitrust’, (Mar 24, 2026)

By Steven Melendez

Meador emphasized the “moral content” of free markets, “common law tradition,” and the FTC’s role in safeguarding competition.

In a speech before the Bull Moose Institute, FTC Commissioner Mark R. Meador referenced Theodore Roosevelt’s 1910 speech titled “The New Nationalism” and spoke of the “moral content” of free markets, which Meador said must be protected through law enforcement. Meador called for an antitrust policy that protects workers, consumers, and innovators, while reflecting “the values of capitalism” and preventing “the abuse of government power” as a tool to thwart competition.

“We cannot shape our economic future if we are unwilling to say plainly what the law requires, and to enforce it,” Meador said. “The antitrust laws exist to safeguard the economic liberty of American citizens. Enforcing these laws promotes the national interest by targeting accumulations and abuses of economic power—whether by private actors who evade competition through collusion or exclusion, or by firms that conscript government process as a competitive weapon against their rivals.”

Roosevelt opposed the big trusts of his day because they “corrupted free markets,” though he still respected those who built the railroads and industrial facilities of the time, Meador said. “What he opposed was unearned advantage and special privileges—power secured through coercion, through deception, through manipulation of public authority, and through structural arrangements that denied others the opportunity to fairly compete,” Meador said.

Antitrust officials’ “core task” is to distinguish legitimate competition from coercion, Meador said, pointing to recent FTC action against Edwards Lifesciences. The company had proposed to acquire JenaValve and JC Medical—the only two companies engaging in clinical trials of a new heart valve treatment. In internal documents, Edwards leaders identified JenaValve as a “competitive threat” and expressed concern about it “gaining momentum, with one executive even saying, in a deposition, “we were just going to be a fat kid at the pie store and we were just going to take them both.”

Such evidence should be the first thing regulators look at to identify misconduct, Meador said.

Antitrust efforts should also look to consumer pricing and labor markets, the commissioner said, focusing on demonstrated abuses rather than taking broad approaches that could lead to “chilling legitimate business activity.” Meador compared the broad approach of the Biden-era FTC in challenging noncompete agreements to action the Commission recently took against Gateway Services, a pet cremation company he said bound all workers to one-year noncompetes, and Adamas Amenity Services, a building services company that he said imposed no-hire agreements that kept security guards and janitors from getting jobs directly with owners of buildings where they worked.

“Dominant firms that try to lock up their workforce in long-term arrangements and threaten litigation against those who cannot afford to defend themselves has long been understood in our common law tradition to be a form of market misconduct that unreasonably restrains trade,” he said.

Meador also referred to four companies with a big share of the “heavy-duty truck market” entering into an agreement with the California Air Resources Board (CARB) agreeing to adhere to certain restrictions even if litigation overturned the board’s legal authority to impose them. “Essentially, regulatory authority was laundered through a private agreement in coordination with state officials outside any politically accountable process,” he said.

But the Trump administration signed legislation overturning CARB’s federal Environmental Protection Agency waivers, and the FTC secured written commitments from the manufacturers pledging not to enforce the CARB agreement against competitors or enter into a similar agreement in the future, Meador said.

In general, Meador said, the America First antitrust policy he calls for is willing to “take decisive action” to safeguard American capitalism.

“We as a country have always celebrated business success and ingenuity,” Meador said. “But part of that appreciation means insisting on accountability when the line is crossed.”

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