The Department of Justice's Antitrust Division was built to be boring in the best possible way. For more than a century, its career attorneys have done the unglamorous work of reading deal documents, running market-share calculations, and telling powerful corporations that no, they cannot simply eliminate their competition. It is precisely the kind of institutional function that goes unnoticed when it works and becomes catastrophic when it doesn't.
It is not working right now. According to reporting by MS NOW, cited by Common Dreams, political appointees installed by the current administration are directly overruling career DOJ attorneys — intervening to weaken or halt merger investigations in a way that multiple current and former officials describe as without precedent. Three unnamed sources told the outlet that DOJ staff have privately complained the administration is "essentially deciding not to enforce antitrust laws that are critical to keeping companies from becoming single-source providers and being able to charge enormous sums for their product or service."
That framing — single-source providers charging enormous sums — is the technical description of a monopoly. What is being described, in other words, is the deliberate construction of monopolies from inside the government agency whose entire mandate is to prevent them.
The DOJ Antitrust Division was formally established during the Great Depression after weak enforcement of the Sherman Act (1890) and Clayton Act (1914) allowed concentrated corporate power to flourish. The Franklin D. Roosevelt administration viewed monopoly not only as a threat to consumers but to democratic governance itself. For most of the postwar era, both Republican and Democratic administrations used the division to block or break up mergers that would reduce market competition. That consensus began eroding under the Reagan administration, which adopted a permissive merger philosophy that has enabled decades of consolidation across industries — a pattern that Biden-era officials had begun, cautiously, to reverse.
The two mergers currently being waved through over career attorneys' objections make the stakes concrete. The first involves Viva Aerobus and Volaris, two low-cost Mexican carriers whose proposed combination would reduce competition on routes between the United States and Mexico. The second involves Saipem, an Italian firm, and Subsea7, a UK firm, whose merger would give the combined entity control over a substantial share of the global market for subsea oil equipment — the specialized infrastructure that major oil companies depend on for offshore drilling operations.
On the second deal, the objections are not coming from consumer advocates or progressive think tanks. They are coming from ExxonMobil, Petrobras, and TotalEnergies — three of the world's largest oil companies, which have filed formal objections with federal regulators arguing that the Saipem-Subsea7 merger would create a subsea monopoly, increase costs, delay critical projects, and force clients into expensive long-term contracts. When ExxonMobil is warning the government that a merger will harm consumers, the government's decision to proceed anyway requires explanation. None has been offered.
The pattern here is not about ideology in any coherent sense. An administration that ran on reducing costs for ordinary Americans is enabling corporate consolidation that experts say will raise the prices those Americans pay for airline tickets and gasoline. Bill Baer, who served as assistant attorney general for the antitrust division under the Obama administration, told MS NOW: "It's unilateral surrender on antitrust enforcement; it's absolutely unprecedented. It's definitely going to hurt consumers. It means prices will go up, concentration is going to increase — and quality often diminishes when you have only a few firms operating in the same market."
The mechanism matters as much as the outcome. What is being described is not a policy disagreement between the White House and career staff over how to interpret antitrust law. It is political appointees intervening in live investigations to stop them. That distinction is significant. Policy disagreements are normal governance. Direct intervention in enforcement decisions by political actors is something different — it is the conversion of a law enforcement apparatus into a tool for determining which corporations face accountability and which do not. The DOJ has been doing something similar in other domains, a pattern this publication has tracked in its coverage of the department's broader politicization.
To understand why this moment is different from ordinary deregulatory politics, it helps to trace the longer arc. The Reagan administration's permissive merger philosophy — which held that consolidation was generally efficient and that market forces would discipline monopolists — laid the groundwork for four decades of corporate consolidation across airlines, telecommunications, healthcare, agriculture, and energy. The results of that philosophy are now visible in the structure of everyday American life: a handful of carriers control most domestic air routes, four companies control most of the beef supply, and three insurers dominate most regional health markets. The Biden administration's attempt to reverse this through aggressive FTC and DOJ enforcement represented the most serious antitrust revival since the 1970s. That project is now being actively dismantled — not through new legislation or even a formal change in regulatory guidance, but through quiet internal intervention that leaves no legislative fingerprint.
That invisibility is the point. A formal policy change would require public comment periods, congressional scrutiny, and a paper trail. What is being described instead is a series of decisions made inside the building, by political appointees, that never become public rule-making. The career attorneys who object have limited recourse. The mergers proceed. The public never learns that the investigation existed.
The global dimension of both deals deserves attention that domestic coverage has largely skipped. The Viva Aerobus-Volaris merger is not primarily a story about American consumers choosing between airlines — it is a story about the economics of travel between the United States and Mexico, a corridor used by millions of Mexican and Mexican-American families for whom low-cost carriers have been the difference between seeing relatives and not. Reduced competition on those routes will fall hardest on travelers with the least flexibility to absorb fare increases. The Saipem-Subsea7 deal, meanwhile, involves two European firms whose combined market power would affect oil extraction costs globally — including for state-owned companies like Petrobras, which serves Brazil's domestic energy market. The DOJ's decision to clear this merger without meaningful scrutiny is not just an American consumer issue; it is a decision with consequences for energy costs across the Western Hemisphere and beyond.
The administration's "America First" framing collapses under this analysis. A merger that raises airfare for families traveling between the U.S. and Mexico, and a merger that raises costs for oil companies that then pass them to consumers at the pump, are not outcomes that serve American workers or American households. They serve the shareholders of the merging firms. The beneficiaries of this enforcement retreat are not American — they are corporate, and the distinction between those two categories is precisely what antitrust law was designed to enforce.
This is also not a story that can be separated from the broader dismantling of consumer-protective institutions. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has had 15 years of consumer protection records deleted. The FTC's aggressive posture under the Biden administration has been reversed. Now the DOJ's antitrust function is being hollowed out from within. Each of these moves, taken individually, can be framed as deregulation. Taken together, they describe the systematic removal of every institutional mechanism that stood between concentrated corporate power and the people that power can price-gouge, overcharge, and exploit.
The Reagan-era merger philosophy at least had a theory: that market efficiency would discipline monopolists, that consumers would benefit from scale, that competition could be trusted to police itself. Four decades of evidence have tested that theory and found it wanting — in healthcare costs, in airline fees, in food prices, in the collapse of local media, in the consolidation of agricultural supply chains. The administration currently intervening in DOJ merger investigations cannot even claim that theory. It has no stated philosophy. It has political appointees making calls on specific deals, behind closed doors, with no public rationale. As this publication has documented in its coverage of what decades of antitrust failure produced at Amazon, the cost of not enforcing these laws is not abstract — it is structural, durable, and extremely difficult to reverse once the consolidation is complete.
Mergers, unlike legislation, are largely irreversible. Once Viva Aerobus and Volaris combine their operations, routes, and pricing systems, the competition they once provided to each other is gone. Once Saipem and Subsea7 integrate their equipment markets, the bargaining power that oil companies previously held over their suppliers disappears. The DOJ's intervention window — the period during which it can demand conditions, block the deal, or require divestitures — closes at consummation. Political appointees who override career attorneys to let these deals through are not making a decision that can be corrected by the next administration. They are making permanent changes to market structure, under cover of bureaucratic process, with consequences that will outlast every political cycle involved.
That is the actual stakes of what is being described as an "unprecedented" intervention. Not a policy disagreement. Not a philosophical difference about regulatory philosophy. A set of irreversible decisions being made by people who were not elected, for reasons that have not been stated, with costs that will be paid by everyone who buys an airline ticket or fills a gas tank — and no mechanism for accountability once the paperwork is signed.
