Four years after inexplicably changing its mission statement, the Federal Trade Commission has reinstated its pledge to protect consumers without encumbering honest businesses. Current leadership, however, continues to advance ideological goals tenuously connected to the agency’s mission, undermining the FTC’s purported pro-business agenda.

On April 3, the FTC published its Strategic Plan for Fiscal Years 2026 to 2030. The plan opens with a message from Chair Andrew Ferguson, explaining that “we have returned the phrase ‘without unduly burdening legitimate business activity’ to the mission statement, reflecting our commitment to end overregulation of American businesses that compete fairly and deal honestly with consumers.” This is a welcome change.

The FTC first formally articulated its mission in compliance with the Government Performance and Results Act of 1993, which requires agencies to submit “strategic plans” containing “a comprehensive mission statement covering the major functions and operations of the agency.” These strategic plans cover five-year periods, and agencies must update them every three years.

The 1997-2002 Strategic Plan defined the FTC’s mission as: “Protecting consumers and competition by preventing anticompetitive, deceptive, and unfair business practices through law enforcement, advocacy, and education without unduly burdening legitimate business activity.” The FTC adhered to the spirit of this mission for twenty-five years.

That all changed in 2022 during the Biden administration. Under Chair Lina Khan, the FTC struck the final clause from the mission statement without explaining the deletion—despite opposition from the public.

Over the next four years, the FTC “worked to maximize its authority” over the business community. Six months after changing the mission, the FTC initiated a rulemaking on so-called “commercial surveillance,” defined as “the business of collecting, analyzing, and profiting from information about people.” The rulemaking extended to conduct, like personalized advertising, that is both legal and beneficial to companies and consumers alike—in other words, legitimate business activity.

Two years later, in 2024, the FTC changed its premerger notification rule, expanding the requirements for firms seeking approval to merge. The new rule “increase[d] the cost and burden of its regulatory processes, which might prevent many even benign and procompetitive mergers and acquisitions (M&A) from getting out of corporate boardrooms.” The FTC itself estimated the change would increase time spent on filings by “an average of 107 additional hours” per merger.

Now, the FTC has reinstated its pre-2022 mission, indicating a return to its longstanding regulatory approach of facilitating, not burdening, procompetitive conduct. The 2026-2030 Strategic Plan, for example, does not mention “commercial surveillance” at all; the FTC appears to have quietly abandoned the sweeping privacy rulemaking. The FTC has also reverted to the pre-2024 premerger notification rule after the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas struck down the new rule because the Commission failed to show “that the Rule’s claimed benefits will ‘reasonably outweigh’ its significant and widespread costs.” And, in December, the FTC set aside a Biden-era consent order against Rytr, an AI-powered writing assistant, because “the order unduly burdens artificial intelligence (AI) innovation.” Chair Ferguson dissented from the original order, condemning the Khan-FTC for threatening “to turn honest innovators into lawbreakers” by penalizing “a generative AI tool merely because of the possibility that someone might use it for fraud.”

Not all the FTC’s recent actions, however, reflect a renewed commitment against burdening legitimate business. In February, the FTC appealed the district court ruling which struck down the 2024 premerger notification rule, fighting to reinstate the more onerous requirements. 

This year, Chair Ferguson has sent a flurry of letters to companies insinuating that the FTC may punish them for business activity perceived as ideologically left-leaning. In February, Ferguson issued a letter to Apple’s then-CEO Tim Cook alleging that “Apple News has systematically promoted news articles from left-wing news outlets and suppressed news articles from more conservative publications.” The following month, he sent warning letters to the CEOs of PayPal, Visa, and Mastercard accusing them of “denying their customers access to services due to their political or religious views.”

These letters suggest that the companies may have deceived consumers by discriminating against conservatives in violation of their terms of service; Ferguson, however, failed to identify a single term of service promising users equal treatment based on political affiliation or viewpoint.

A regulator sending vague, threatening letters to companies with disfavored views is a quintessential example of government jawboning. These attacks on businesses detract from the FTC’s core mission of protecting consumers from fraud and deception.

Chair Ferguson criticized Lina Khan for focusing on “base politics” rather than “law enforcement.” But in some ways he has followed in her footsteps despite adding “without unduly burdening legitimate business activity” back to the mission statement.