DOJ Antitrust Division

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In the first major initiative of the Antitrust Division within the Trump Administration’s Department of Justice, the DOJ announced on March 28, 2025 the creation of a task force to “advocate for the elimination of anticompetitive state and federal laws and regulations that undermine free market competition and harm consumers, workers, and businesses.” Citing President Trump’s Executive Order 14219, which mandated such reviews, the DOJ’s announcement called out for special scrutiny the “regulatory capture” of agencies by “special interests and big businesses” in five economic sectors:  housing, transportation, food and agriculture, healthcare, and energy.Continue Reading U.S. Department of Justice Launches “Anticompetitive Regulations” Task Force

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On November 13, 2023, the DOJ Antitrust Division moved to dismiss its last remaining no-poach indictment.  In 2021, a Texas grand jury indicted Surgical Care Affiliates (“SCA”) and a related company for conspiring with competitors not to solicit each other’s senior-level employees.  While a motion to dismiss was pending in that case, a district court in Connecticut entered a judgment of acquittal (“JOA”) on labor market allocation charges brought against several engineering firms, ruling in United States v. Patel that, among other things, ample evidence of employees moving between the defendant companies meant that any conspiracy to restrict such movement could have had no “meaningful” effect on competition and was not illegal per se.    Continue Reading An Uncertain Future for DOJ’s No-Poach Prosecutions