This FTC Was the Most Effective in Decades Thanks to Lina Khan

The first few days of the Trump administration have made it abundantly clear that lowering costs for the American people is taking a back seat to empowering billionaires and weaponizing the government to wage right-wing culture wars.

As Chair Lina Khan leaves the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), I’d like to highlight what service to the American people looks like by highlighting the FTC’s accomplishments over the past four years under her leadership.

Over the last four years, the FTC has consistently delivered for consumers, lowering costs and creating a fairer, more honest, and more competitive economy. Under Chair Khan’s leadership, the FTC took strong actions to make prescription drugs and other health care more affordable, improve access to housing, protect workers, help small businesses, keep kids and teens safer online, protect childrens’ and all Americans’ data privacy, and tackle threats to consumers created by artificial intelligence.

I praise and applaud the spectacular work of the FTC under Chair Khan’s leadership and thank the dedicated staff of the agency for their exemplary service to the American people.

Under Chair Khan, the FTC banned hotels and sellers of sports and concert tickets from charging American consumers junk fees, saving consumers $11 billion over the next decade. They finalized a rule making it simple to "click to cancel," ensuring that consumers don’t get trapped into paying for subscriptions they can’t escape. The FTC also obtained $1.5 billion in consumer refunds over the past four years, ranging from tax preparation companies to corporate landlords. And they banned noncompete clauses to increase the average American worker’s wages by $524 a year.

Chair Khan and the rest of the FTC fervently protected the personal data of millions of Americans by aggressively policing the illegal collection, use, and sale of consumers’ sensitive data. They banned data brokers from selling consumers’ location data, stopped health apps from sharing consumer health data for advertising purposes, and limited companies’ ability to profit from kids’ personal data.

The FTC stood up to pharma’s attempts to unlawfully inflate the price of lifesaving medications including EpiPens and inhalers. Their work reduced out-of-pocket costs for inhalers from $500 to $35 and held three of the largest pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) accountable for engaging in anticompetitive practices that inflated the cost of insulin.

I praise and applaud the spectacular work of the FTC under Chair Khan’s leadership and thank the dedicated staff of the agency for their exemplary service to the American people. Their commitment to battling corporate greed and protecting consumers should serve as an inspiring example to the new administration.