The US Department of Justice antitrust division will be led by Gail Slater following a successful Congressional confirmation vote today. Slater will take over multiple antitrust cases against large tech firms, filed under both Donald Trump and Joe Biden — including a high-profile Google search monopoly suit.
The Senate voted to confirm Slater with bipartisan support as Assistant Attorney General for the Antitrust Division. She’ll be joining Trump’s administration for the second time — she worked for the National Economic Council during his first term and was an economic policy advisor and Senate staff member for Vice President JD Vance before the election. She has a long history in antitrust law, joining the Federal Trade Commission to work on merger cases starting in 2004 and later lobbying for anti-monopoly legislation while working for Roku. Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley (R-IA) urged colleagues to confirm Slater by noting her “several years” of private antitrust law practice and a decade-long stint at the FTC.
Slater will join the administration in the middle of US v. Google, an antitrust case that saw Google declared an unlawful monopolist last year. A hearing scheduled next month will decide what remedies to enforce against it, including a potential breakup of the company. She will be replacing Jonathan Kanter, under whom the DOJ won its case against Google.
The new antitrust watchdog hasn’t firmly articulated when and where the DOJ will fight its new battles. When Utah Republican Senator Mike Lee, who leads the antitrust subcommittee, asked about her commitment to see through antitrust enforcement started under Trump, she said, “resources are of course a very important consideration” in taking cases further, adding that antitrust civil litigation is “costly so that will be a consideration.”
Other parts of the Trump administration have used their power to go after political enemies, and Trump’s long-standing antagonism with companies like Google has raised concerns of politically motivated litigation. Minnesota Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar, who has said she had heard good things about Slater, asked during the confirmation hearing whether she would “open an investigation or file a lawsuit for any reason other than legitimate law enforcement purposes.” Slater responded that she doesn’t “anticipate a fact pattern like you described.”