Profile of FTC Chair Lina Khan, as some longtime staffers worry she is underestimating the risks of pursuing aggressive antitrust cases that are likely to fail
As monopolies and other large companies gain increasing control of our daily lives, Khan is Joe Biden's pick to do something about it. Tweets: @davidmwessel , @michaelluo , @sheelahk , @econliberties , @daviduberti , @lutherlowe , and @pkafka Tweets: David Wessel / @davidmwessel : Lina Kahn was offered a job covering commodities for @WSJ but decided to go to Yale Law School instead....and now she chairs the Federal Trade Commission. https://www.newyorker.com/... via @NewYorker Michael Luo / @michaelluo : Khan was accepted at Yale law school, and @wsj offered her a position as a reporter covering commodities. “It was a real ‘choose the path’ moment,” Khan told @sheelahk. She chose Yale. Now she's one of the most powerful regulators of American business. https://www.newyorker.com/... Sheelah Kolhatkar / @sheelahk : Is it time to break up Big Tech? My profile of new FTC Chair Lina Khan, who might actually do it @NewYorker https://www.newyorker.com/... @econliberties : Fantastic profile of @linakhanFTC's “earth-shattering” ascent to power by @sheelahk, which features important analyses from Economic Liberties' @matthewstoller. https://www.newyorker.com/... David Uberti / @daviduberti : Incredible quote for an outgoing FTC commish to give to The New Yorker as current FTC leadership tries to assure career staff that they aren't being sidelined: https://www.newyorker.com/... https://twitter.com/... Luther Lowe / @lutherlowe : Excellent profile of @linakhanFTC by @sheelahk in The New Yorker https://www.newyorker.com/... Peter Kafka / @pkafka : Related! FTC Lina Khan profiled in The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/... https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Two weeks before this New Yorker profile, a Wall Street Journal report found Republican commissioners and some career officials feeling shut out under Khan's leadership — claims she rejected in an agency-wide memo. The profile lands squarely in that friction: the same longtime staffers who feel excluded are now the ones warning that her appetite for aggressive, likely-to-fail cases is a strategic miscalculation.
The arc runs long. Five months later an internal survey showed staff satisfaction falling from 89% to 60%, with Khan pledging to fix sinking morale; by 2023 she was touring Silicon Valley to convince a skeptical tech sector of the government's good intentions, and by late 2024, after her term ended, a bipartisan club including Reid Hoffman was calling for her ouster. This profile is the early document of the tension between her ambition and the institution around her.
First-order effects
- Khan's own enforcement agenda is at stake: if longtime FTC staffers are right that marquee cases are being pursued without sufficient odds of winning, the agency risks burning credibility and resources on public losses against Big Tech targets like Facebook, Amazon, and Alphabet.
Second-order effects
- Internal dissent compounds: the staffer unease sits alongside the exclusion complaints from Republican commissioners and career officials, pressuring Khan to manage both litigation risk and an agency whose satisfaction scores were already sliding toward the 60% recorded in 2021.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — aggressive filings, contested wins, eroding staff confidence — the backlash hardens into organized opposition, as it did by 2024 when tech figures and VCs openly campaigned for her removal, making the durability of any antitrust agenda dependent on surviving its own bureaucracy.
The trend: Antitrust enforcement under Khan is testing whether a regulator can pursue structural challenges to Big Tech faster than institutional resistance — internal and external — can blunt the agenda.