Some White House officials hope the order will hark back to the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who highlighted the rise of big business and installed government officials opposed to concentration, said people familiar with the matter.
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The order is a victory for the growing group of lawmakers, academics and rival companies who say government regulators failed to check the growth of corporate America for decades, instead aligning themselves with a conservative view of the law that set a high standard for when the government should block mergers or break up monopolies.
They say that policymakers need to aggressively enforce antitrust laws and possibly rewrite them entirely. Without drastic action, they argue, consumers will have less choice, suppliers of bigger companies will get squeezed and giant corporations will only grow larger.
Mr. Biden has already put some vocal critics of corporate power in leadership positions. In the White House, he appointed Tim Wu, a Columbia University law professor and outspoken proponent of breaking up companies like Facebook, as a special adviser on competition. He named Lina Khan as chair of the Federal Trade Commission. Ms. Khan worked on a House antitrust investigation into Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google and earlier in her career wrote about critically concentration in other industries, like candy manufacturing and agriculture.
But Mr. Biden’s administration is limited in its reach. The Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Communications Commission are independent agencies that enforce existing antitrust and communications laws. He has also not yet nominated someone to lead the Department of Justice’s antitrust division, a key position in determining the administration’s position on competition issues.