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On August 13, 2025, President Trump revoked the Biden Administration's 2021 Executive Order (Promoting Competition in the American Economy).
The 2021 Executive Order was an expansive recalibration of U.S. antitrust enforcement. It included 72 initiatives to be undertaken by more than a dozen federal agencies. In particular, the Executive Order focused on preserving competition in several, specifically identified industries, including healthcare and agriculture and sought to remove barriers to competition such as non-competes. In a press release discussing the revocation of the 2021 Executive Order, the Antitrust Division commented that the revocation will allow it to "continue its work to recalibrate and modernize the Federal approach to competition policy to suit the needs of our dynamic and innovative economy" and "the Division commends the Administration for promoting competition via tailored executive orders that call for lowering drug prices and opening regulatory barriers to competition."
Notably, however, two significant Biden-era changes to U.S. antitrust enforcement remain in place. First, the Trump administration has adopted the 2023 Merger Guidelines, which changed substantially the substantive framework the U.S. antitrust agencies employ to investigate mergers. Second, the new Hart-Scott-Rodino Act rules were finalized on February 10, 2025. These new rules require vastly more information to be provided by merging parties, and many practitioners had expected the Trump administration to withdraw or at least scale-back both the Guidelines and the HSR rules.
Stepping back, comparing antitrust enforcement across administrations is a challenging exercise and the data is mixed. What we do know, just a few months in, is the administration's antitrust enforcement agencies are actively investigating mergers and conduct and continuing to litigate cases, and that they have kept two signature policy changes from the previous administration to help them do so.
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