Biden Targeted Your Grocery Discounts–Trump Will Trump Them
Brian McNicoll /
Last November, during the government shutdown, President Donald Trump ordered air traffic controllers back to work, and Pete Buttigieg, who served as secretary of transportation under President Joe Biden, took to X to express his displeasure.
“The president wouldn’t last five minutes as an air traffic controller,” Buttigieg wrote.
To which Sean Duffy, the current transportation secretary, responded: “Give me a break. You were AWOL at the DOT. I spend my whole day dealing with your neglect and cleaning up your messes. Sit this one out.”
Ric Grenell, tasked by Trump with running the Kennedy Center, was shocked to find $26 million unaccounted for, a former director more interested in traveling the world than managing the center, and a facility in such ill repair that it required not just repair but a two-year overhaul that will close the facility for the first time.
And of course, there’s the granddaddy of them all—immigration. The Trump administration just announced an eighth straight month in which no one illegally crossed the southern border. Immigration levels are at their lowest in more than 50 years. Trump was right: We didn’t need a new law; we just needed a new president.
All over the government, the Trump administration is discovering that a lot of the country’s problems stem from the mess left by the autopen-driven Biden administration—the neglect, the ridiculous policy decisions, the regulations that hamstrung Americans to no discernible benefit. As Duffy said, there is a lot to clean up.
Already this year, the government has removed a Securities and Exchange Commission rule that prohibited publicly traded companies from opposing the Left’s narratives on global warming. It has ended the Endangerment Finding, in which the Environmental Protection Agency declared that carbon is a poison, which will save perhaps trillions of dollars.
It has worked tirelessly on undoing the socialist edicts issued by Biden Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan. Khan, who served as the co-chair of the Zohran Mamdani campaign, made it her mission to remake the American economy in her socialist image.
FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson has already killed many of her headline-grabbing cases because they were built on shaky legal theories and were unbeneficial for Americans.
He has made it clear that the agency’s job is to protect competition and consumers, not to punish businesses simply for being large or successful.
But there is one case left—Southern Glazer’s.
The case gets its name from the plaintiff—a wholesale alcohol distributor—but the specifics of this one company aren’t important. The larger story is that, on multiple occasions, the FTC under Khan tried to make bulk pricing illegal, and this was just one example of it.
Khan hated the fact that merchants give better deals to people who buy in large quantities. She claimed that this is unfair to the bodegas of the world.
Never mind that this is how American grocers keep products affordable, that consumers are the ones who benefit from the lower prices, or that the government itself is one of the largest beneficiaries of bulk pricing.
She claimed this violated a nearly 90-year-old law originally meant to stop companies from secretly undercutting rivals to drive them out of business.
But bulk pricing isn’t predatory pricing. Anyone who is willing to purchase in bulk can buy at the same discounted rate. This would only be predatory if the terms and playing field weren’t level.
Thankfully, that matter is now facing increasing court pressure as of this month—and this newfound legal momentum should position the Trump administration to clean up this last Biden-era mess once and for all.
Ferguson was on the FTC when Khan filed these suits and wrote a stinging dissent to the agency’s actions when they occurred. He pointed out that the Robinson-Patman Act—the law Khan cited as its justification for the suit—explicitly allows for pricing differences when the costs of delivery are different, and that Khan and her allies could not show any harm to consumers. Of course, it couldn’t—they were enjoying lower prices.
Now Ferguson has a chance to unload this case once and for all.
Wittingly and unwittingly, the Biden administration left this place a mess. Trump is more than a year into his new term, and his agencies are still cleaning up.
Ferguson and the Trump FTC have already nearly finished part of the job, ending the Biden administration’s experiment with weaponized antitrust once and for all.
Now, it just needs to leverage this legal momentum in Southern Glazer’s to take care of this last lingering case of overreach. The federal government should not be in the business of trying to raise prices on consumers in the name of a radical socialist ideology.
It should be protecting competition and lowering costs. Cleaning up this last relic of the Khan era would send a clear message: the days of punishing businesses for offering discounts are over—and common sense is back in charge.