Sources: Republican FTC commissioners and some career officials feel excluded under the current leadership; Lina Khan rejected the claims in an agency-wide memo
Criticized by Republicans, Khan tells agency staffers she aims to build bridges going forward Tweets: @wsj , @hotlinejosh , @karlbode , @brkend , and @sidhubaba Tweets: @wsj : Lina Khan, the new Federal Trade Commission chairwoman, has faced early turbulence within the agency, including from career staffers she will need to build antitrust cases and write regulations https://www.wsj.com/... Josh Kraushaar / @hotlinejosh : “Ms. Khan, whose early professional career has included stints as a professor and a congressional staffer, is leading an agency of more than 1,100 people...” https://www.wsj.com/... Karl Bode / @karlbode : oh no not turbulent https://www.wsj.com/... Brent Kendall / @brkend : Lina Khan came to the FTC with a progressive vision to transform antitrust enforcement. She has faced a turbulent start as chair, including with career staffers who feel like an afterthought. https://www.wsj.com/... Siddhartha Mahanta / @sidhubaba : In light of the Kanter appointment over at DOJ, it seems to me like FTC leadership is in lock step with the administration's priorities. Seems career staff should/could pay heed to this fact? https://www.wsj.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Two weeks into the fallout from this report, the picture darkened rather than healed: an internal FTC survey showed overall staff satisfaction falling from 89% in 2020 to 60% in 2021, with Khan again pledging by email to fix morale. A contemporaneous New Yorker profile added a second axis of doubt — longtime staffers worrying she was underestimating the risk of aggressive antitrust cases likely to fail.
First-order effects
- Republican commissioners and some career officials are now working under a chair who publicly disputes their grievance, and Khan must still rely on those same staffers to draft the regulations and build the antitrust cases her agenda requires.
Second-order effects
- The exclusion complaints harden into measurable attrition risk: the satisfaction collapse documented months later gives critics inside and outside the agency evidence that the bridge-building pledge is not landing, pressuring Khan to change how cases are staffed and vetted.
Third-order effects
- If internal dissent keeps compounding, enforcement strategy gets constrained by coalition management rather than legal ambition — a dynamic that ends with Khan's term closing amid bipartisan calls from tech figures and VCs, including Reid Hoffman, for her removal.
The trend: Aggressive antitrust enforcement is becoming as much a test of an agency chair's ability to hold together commissioners and career staff as of the legal theory behind the cases.