During Thursday’s House Appropriations Committee hearing, Rep. Ashley Hinson (R-IA) questioned Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson.
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00:00Chair now recognizes the gentlelady from Iowa, Mrs. Henson, for further questions.
00:06Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
00:07And Chairman Ferguson, again, I want to reiterate, I appreciate the agency's focus on accountability.
00:14Again, coming back into the focus here, you mentioned in your opening statement,
00:18you know, the two-year hiring spree that was, quote, taking the FTC to levels that they couldn't sustain.
00:24We have to right that ship.
00:26Many agencies saw increases over the last several years of more than 30%.
00:30That is unsustainable.
00:31So I appreciate the work you're doing to right-size the agency while still executing on the priorities at FTC.
00:38You talk about the contract spending reductions, $6 million.
00:41I'm sure that's just kind of scratching the surface, right?
00:43And in all of these hearings, I think there's one common theme.
00:45It's that we are peeling back the layers of this onion and finally getting a look at all of the waste,
00:50the duplicative nature of some of these agencies and their budgets.
00:56And we, as appropriators, need to do our job.
00:58So I appreciate you coming before us today to answer some of these questions.
01:02And under the previous FTC chair, obviously, we saw this hiring spree happen.
01:06We saw Chair Kahn aggressively work to regulate American businesses while claiming that she was protecting competition and consumers.
01:14So, again, you talk about your refocus on away from rulemaking and back on protection.
01:20Can you share with the committee some of the lessons you really learned from the previous administration
01:25and the impacts of those regulatory burdens on small businesses, farmers, working families,
01:31like those you visited in rural Virginia recently?
01:34Yeah, my experience over the course of my whole career is that even well-intentioned regulation
01:41tends to have unanticipated effects, and those effects are normally visited
01:45on the least powerful participants in an industry, which is normally small and medium-sized businesses.
01:51Big businesses can afford to lobby regulators and lawmakers to get the outcomes that they want
01:55in a way that small and medium-sized businesses cannot.
01:58And there is always a risk with regulation that regulation will be used to insulate monopolies
02:05or to create monopolies.
02:06But it's hard to sort of predict, you know, when well-intentioned regulation is going to do that.
02:12I think that, you know, the benefit of the way that the antitrust laws work is that they,
02:18the principal motivation is don't harm consumers and workers in the marketplace.
02:23Free markets are good.
02:25They work.
02:26Don't, within the free market structure, harm consumers to gain an advantage.
02:30And our job is to make sure that isn't happening.
02:33We're not central planners.
02:34We don't do industrial policy.
02:35Our job is to let the markets work by making sure that people within them aren't cheating
02:40by harming consumers to get a leg up.
02:42And I think that that sort of flexible, general approach, backed by rigorous investigation
02:47and law enforcement, rather than trying to pick winners and losers through regulation,
02:51is the way that we keep America competitive.
02:54It's the way we keep our dynamic.
02:55And it's the way that we achieve growth that benefits everyone, especially workers.
02:59You mentioned earlier in this hearing that you had a mechanism for people to kind of self-report.
03:04One of the frequent things that I try to talk to our small businesses about is give me a list, right?
03:09Give me a list of the regulations.
03:11Everybody says I need regulatory relief.
03:13Give me a list of what's holding you back.
03:15What is that mechanism?
03:17And obviously it's designed to make sure that we can deregulate as much as possible.
03:21And then can you, again, give me kind of a scope of what the next steps that you're taking in terms of presenting that information to the administration?
03:28Yeah, there's a place on our website that you can go.
03:31You just fill out a form, identify what you think the regulation that is anti-competitive is,
03:36give a brief explanation of why, and then it shows up in our team's inbox and they're ready to go on it.
03:41I encourage Congress to do this too.
03:43Again, you all interact with your constituents in a close, personal way.
03:47You hear from your individual small businesses about what's holding them back.
03:51I've had similar conversations where I've had people come in and say,
03:54you really need to go after anti-competitive regulations.
03:56And I'll say, I agree.
03:57Can you please give me the list?
03:59And they'll go, oh, well, no, no.
04:00The list is very helpful.
04:01Yeah, be specific, right?
04:02Yeah, exactly.
04:02Yeah.
04:04So I encourage Congress, if you all hear from your constituents, let us know what they are too.
04:09We've asked the agency heads, consistent with the president's executive order, to do the same thing.
04:14Once the request for information, which is the one the public can use on our website,
04:18and the agency responses are in, we will be going through them proposed reg by proposed reg
04:23and determining if they're anti-competitive.
04:26And if they are, either proposing shrinking them down to size so that they are protecting
04:30whatever they're supposed to protect without damaging competition,
04:33or recommending that they be deleted entirely because there's no way to save them while still promoting competition.
04:37Is there a certain time frame that you're looking at, and I'm almost out of time,
04:40a certain time frame you're looking at getting some of this feedback in so that you can,
04:44number one, work through the process?
04:46Because I know it'll take some time to figure out what's actually anti-competitive
04:48versus what people just don't want to comply with, right?
04:50I mean, I think there's probably a balance to be, there's definitely a balance to be had there.
04:54But I think, is there any kind of timeline that you're looking at?
04:58The RFI closes in a couple months, and agency responses are due to us on a rolling basis.
05:03So once we have those in, we're building the team with the Department of Justice,
05:07who has a lot of resources that will work alongside us on this, just like the President ordered.
05:12You know, I don't know exactly when the outcome, or when our product will be made available,
05:17because at this point, I don't know how many regulations we're going to be asked to review.
05:20But we'll have an army of economists and lawyers ready to go to dig into these things,
05:25to find the ones that are anti-competitive, and go back to OMB and the President and say,
05:29here's the list we recommend getting rid of.
05:30I'm sure Iowa business owners have some glaring examples, they'll be happy to submit.
05:34I look forward to hearing about them.
05:35Thank you so much, Chairman Ferguson.
05:36I yield back.