According to Adam Candeub’s bio in The Mandate for Leadership, he “is a professor of law at Michigan State University. His scholarly research focuses on telecommunication, antitrust, and Internet issues. He served as acting Assistant Secretary of Commerce and Deputy Associate Attorney General at the Justice Department during the Trump Administration.” He is also a senior fellow at the Center for Renewing America. The center “was founded in 2021 by Russ Vought who served in President Trump’s Cabinet as Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).” (More on Vought here.)
Candeub’s chapter on the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) includes the following description of the FTC: The FTC exists thanks to various laws that empower it “to combat anticompetitive, unfair, and deceptive practices in the marketplace, [including] unfair methods of competition and unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce.” The FTC has legal authority “to block unlawful tying contracts, unlawful corporate mergers and acquisitions, and interlocking directorates.”
The Mandate for Leadership describes Candeub’s chapter on the FTC in this way:
“Antitrust law can combat dominant firms’ baleful effects on democratic” notions—“such as free speech, the marketplace of ideas, shareholder control, and managerial accountability as well as collusive behavior with government.”
This passage presumably refers to a right-wing grievance that, to be frank, is not aligned with reality. Many on the right have accused big tech platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and others of having a bias against right-wing views and content, and that the government is somehow involved in this bias. If anything, the opposite is true.
As for shareholder control, the right-wing theme since the days of Milton Friedman is that corporations have no social responsibility at all—their sole purpose is to make profits for shareholders. Conservatives have embraced this idea since then. This explains, in part, The Mandate for Leadership’s overblown hatred of corporations’ inclusion of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) concerns and of investors’ taking ESG issues into account. Corporate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts receive The Mandate for Leadership’s scorn for the same reason.
(See page 905 of the PDF, or page 873 of the physical book, for Candeub’s strange accusation that ESG and DEI measures may well be anticompetitive and possibly unfair. Such an accusation may be a means of avoiding an obvious issue. That issue is that investors and shareholders may freely decide for themselves whether ESG and DEI measures are important to them, and thus ESG and DEI are perfectly in accordance with the supposed fair, competitive, free-market ideals of conservatives. Because of this, conservatives may feel compelled to make some dubious complaint against ESG and DEI that obscures the issue that ESG and DEI may well fit under the free market umbrella. That conservatives may object to ESG and DEI because conservatives simply oppose ethical and socially aware corporate leadership and support white male supremacy is something people may consider for themselves.)
In writing about the FTC, Candeub may also be credited with following The Mandate for Leadership’s widely held view that federal government functions may best be relegated to the states or set more in alignment with those of the states. What is largely left unstated is that what The Mandate for Leadership really means is that federal government functions should be left to, or brought into cooperation with, Republican-led states and that Democratic-run states that resist conservative law and policy measures should be punished—for example via lawsuits and withholding of federal funds, among other coercive measures.
Under a “needed reforms” subhead in his chapter of the FTC, Candeub also shows that he is aligned with other chapters of The Mandate for Leadership in that he raises the question of whether the agency he is writing about should even exist.
The Department of Education, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Commerce, among others, receive similar consideration in the book. For example, the FBI is a “bloated, arrogant, increasingly lawless organization,” and the “National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories.”
Candeub writes: “Some conservatives think that antitrust enforcement should be invested solely in the Department of Justice (DOJ). The FTC’s commissioners are not removable at will
by the President, which many quite reasonably believe violates the Vesting Clause of Article II of the Constitution; it is for this reason that conservatives have long believed in either ending law enforcement activities of independent agencies or ending their independent status.”
What such a line of thinking clearly implies is that, under Project 2025, law enforcement agencies that have some de facto independence from the political influence of the White House would lose that independence. This means that the president could sic federal law enforcement on his political rivals and prevent law enforcement against his allies. This could well include the FTC’s enforcement or lack thereof of antitrust law, thus allowing, for example, companies that contribute to a president’s political campaign and/or affiliated groups to have their mergers approved, even if that is bad news for consumers. It also means that companies that voice any opposition to a president’s policies, or that criticize a president, or even fail to contribute to a president’s campaign, could face legal investigations and possible prosecution, even if that prosecution has little or no merit. This radical change in the U.S. government’s structure should raise alarm among not only liberals but also moderates and conservatives.
In his chapter, Candeub goes on to two less controversial topics. One is whether and how the FTC could use its law enforcement powers to better protect children online. Another is how the FTC might address the market power of large internet platforms, including those that offer their services for free (e.g., Google) and thus complicate the issue of how consumers may be adversely affected.
While Candeub seems, unlike other backers of Project 2025, to have avoided leaving a trail of controversial or even incendiary public statements, his questioning of the FTC’s relative independence from political pressure is thoroughly worrisome and should be of concern to all.
