The FTC's Feeder School

Laissez-faire George Mason University built a tech-funded pipeline to regulators, critics say

- David McLaughlin, with Naomi Nix

The Tech Transparency Project (TTP), a watchdog group in Washington, details in a new report an unusually close relationship between the law school at Virginia’s George Mason University and the Federal Trade Commission. By helping shape the workforce of the FTC, the group claims, the school infused it with a laissez-faire philosophy favorable to the school’s tech donors.

The report throws a harsh light on the FTC’s hands-off approach to tech companies over the past decade. As the agency prepares to argue the lawsuit against Facebook Inc. that it filed late last year, seeking to break up the social media giant, it must contend with an inconvenient fact: It approved Facebook’s acquisitions of Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014—the very mergers it now seeks to undo. The FTC’s consent to those deals is cited by critics as evidence of a permissive attitude that allowed tech companies to grow into leviathans.

One explanation for its lenience, the TTP report charges, is that the industry used a corner of academia to capture the agency. According to the report, which was set to be published on March 12, Silicon Valley donated substantial sums to George Mason’s Antonin Scalia Law School, which built a pipeline of professors and graduates who went to work at the FTC. Dozens of people went from the school to the regulator—commissioners, bureau heads, attorney-advisers, legal interns—during the Obama and Trump administrations.

Under President Trump alone, professors and graduates of Scalia Law, and heads of affiliated programs at George Mason, served as the FTC chair, general counsel, policy planning head, and leaders of its three main divisions: the bureaus of competition, consumer protection, and economics.