DOGE has arrived at the FTC.
The agency oversees companies like Elon Musk's, known as X.
Two members of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) were recently seen at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) headquarters, according to sources close to the matter. Gavin Kliger and Emily Bryant were identified inside the building and are now listed in the FTC’s internal directory under the Office of the Chair, with email addresses corresponding to their agency.
An FTC spokesperson, Joe Simonson, stated that DOGE's mission is to “eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse.” However, it is unclear what specific areas it will address now that it is integrated into the FTC, which is a relatively small agency with fewer than 1,200 employees dedicated to consumer protection and antitrust law enforcement. Additionally, a small number of probationary workers were laid off earlier this year.
FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson has expressed his view that regulatory agencies should be under presidential control rather than operating as independent entities, as has been traditional. The agency has access to a large volume of non-public information about the companies it investigates, including data for an upcoming antitrust trial against Meta. Many of the FTC's case records are physically stored at its headquarters, while documents obtained through discovery are handled on a platform called Relativity.
Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, one of the two Democratic commissioners of the FTC whom Trump attempted to dismiss in an action that contradicts decades of Supreme Court precedents, recently warned that the agency possesses some of the most sensitive financial data from businesses across the economy. During a panel at the American Bar Association, she emphasized that it would be “very illegal” and “concerning” if such data were “accessed by other market participants.”
The FTC has active oversight over Musk's businesses. For example, X is under a prolonged consent decree with the agency due to Twitter’s mishandling of user data prior to Musk acquiring the social network. Additionally, Musk has supported the idea of removing the FTC's authority to enforce antitrust legislation, concentrating that power in the Department of Justice, which is already collaborating with the FTC on selecting antitrust cases to pursue.