The Department of Justice under President Donald Trump recently took a long-overdue step toward restoring sanity to U.S. antitrust policy.
Right before Independence Day, the DOJ backed away from an overreaching and misguided challenge to Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s acquisition of Juniper Networks. This reversal undoes the damage done by an interim antitrust official who signed the department onto the case 10 days after the inauguration.
As I previously wrote at The Daily Signal, the case never made sense as Hewlett Packard Enterprise-Juniper wouldn’t have even been close to being the U.S. market leader if the deal went through.
And let’s not forget that America is far behind Huawei, which the Department of Defense identified as a company controlled by China’s People’s Liberation Army, in the global telecom space. This merger would have helped the U.S. better compete with the Chinese Communist Party.
Cue the predictable outrage from the American Economic Liberties Project, a far-left advocacy group that never met a merger it liked.
In their eyes, this antitrust course correction is a corporate giveaway. It’s not. It’s a return to antitrust common sense.
While the Biden administration believed otherwise, antitrust enforcement isn’t supposed to be about punishing businesses for being big or successful. It’s about protecting competition, innovation, and ultimately consumers. And sometimes, mergers promote exactly those outcomes.
American Economic Liberties Project doesn’t see it that way. Its objection to the Hewlett Packard Enterprise-Juniper deal isn’t rooted in protecting the public. It’s rooted in the organization’s anti-corporate ideology.
The group wants to paint every merger as a threat and every successful company as a potential monopolist. That’s not sound economics. It’s an ideological grievance dressed up in legalese.
Look no further than the other cases the group is cheerleading.
It’s the same group behind the DOJ’s outrageous lawsuit targeting property management software providers like RealPage.
In that case, the government is trying to blame rent increases on software.
You read that right—not on housing supply shortages, inflationary spending, or local zoning rules, but on an AI algorithm.
A former senior Trump staffer rightly called this American Economic Liberties Project and President Joe Biden-pushed case “a transparently obnoxious case of politically motivated lawfare.” I agree.
Or take its applause for Biden’s suit against Visa’s debit card business. The theory? That Visa’s debit card fees “raise the price of nearly everything.”
Again, blaming a private company for inflation of the government’s doing. Never mind the dozens of competitors that Visa has or the total lack of evidence that the company has done anything anticompetitive.
Stay classy, Biden and the American Economic Liberties Project.
And who can forget the organization’s crusade to block the JetBlue-Spirit merger? That misguided challenge led directly to Spirit Airlines filing for bankruptcy, eliminating one of the only budget options in the air and reducing competition against the big four airlines. The outcome? Fewer choices and likely higher prices for travelers.
That’s the legacy of ideological antitrust enforcement—fewer options, weaker companies, and worse outcomes for consumers.
Antitrust enforcement should be guided by sound economic analysis, not ideological outrage. It should focus on real consumer harm, not hypothetical market scenarios cooked up by activists.
That doesn’t mean every merger should be rubber-stamped. But it does mean recognizing that many mergers make companies more competitive and efficient on both the domestic and global stages, especially in sectors where American leadership is vital. Blocking those deals out of reflexive hostility to big business only weakens our economy.
Let the American Economic Liberties Project rage. Their tired playbook of corporate scapegoating is wearing thin.
The Trump administration should continue to ignore the organization and remain focused on strengthening the U.S. economy, boosting the country’s competitiveness with China, and restoring the rule of law.
This paradigm shift is long overdue.
