Gail Slater, Donald Trump’s head of antitrust, is tasked with a formidable agenda that requires precision: Foster a business-friendly environment that lets tech companies stay big enough to compete with China while ensuring they don’t become excessively dominant.
“It’s about enforcing antitrust robustly in a way that works for all Americans … that’s my starting point,” Slater, 53, told me in her first interview since taking on her role as Assistant Attorney General for the Antitrust Division at the Department of Justice a little over 100 days ago.
Slater took over a serious docket of cases that includes suits against Google, in regards to search and ad tech; Apple, for its smartphone market dominance; Visa, in relation to debit card payment processing; and Live Nation/Ticketmaster and its live entertainment business.
While she won’t comment on the status of those cases, she’s been a key advisor urging Trump to stay the course on antitrust enforcement — despite tech companies’ efforts to sway him.
(When I asked how frequently she discusses agenda with President Trump, she told me, “We get a lot of signals from the White House in the form of Executive Orders.”)
Slater is deeply committed and believes aggressive antitrust enforcement can benefit consumers in countless ways — even on seemingly unrelated issues.
“Speech and the censorship of speech can be downstream of [tech companies] market power,” she noted.
Not everyone on the right agrees with her. Some Republicans, like Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), believe the US government should tread lightly with tech companies. They worry that too much regulation could unintentionally give China a dangerous advantage when it comes to artificial intelligence.
But Slater feels antitrust efforts could actually give the US a leg-up.
“Companies competing against one another innovate. That’s the free market at its finest,” she explained. “We can win the AI race against the Chinese without becoming like China… we will win the global race to AI the American way.”
Bringing cases against massive companies can cost millions, making Slater’s job — at a time when everyone in the federal government is under the gun to cut costs — especially challenging.
“The big tech cases alone are a huge, huge lift, both from a human resource standpoint, a scale standpoint when it comes to documents and experts and how we put those cases on a trial,” Slater said.
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Her efforts, she said, have to be “low resource, high return on investment things.”
And even though she is focused on ending unfair monopolies, she’s also trying to implement as many pro-business policies as she can.
On the front end, Slater is now allowing early terminations to the (previously) mandatory 30-day waiting period for mergers to close on deals the DOJ deems benign. Since taking the helm, she has granted 58 of 322 filings, worth $71 billion.
“In particular, we are taking settlements in merger cases where the previous administration took none,” she said.
At the back end of deals, she has embraced the use of consent decrees — allowing parties to resolve competitive overlaps by divesting assets to qualified buyers, a practice the prior administration largely avoided.
“We listened hard to concerns that Wall Street and others had about the policy of the prior administration on deal flow,” she told me of efforts to simplify rules where she can. “We inherited a historic docket and we want to be responsible stewards of that, But we’re also setting [the agenda] by fixing the merger review process to make it more transparent, to make work better for deal makers.”
Slater, who is soft-spoken, jokes “this is me raising my voice” when talking about the efforts they’ve already made to cut over-regulation.
She has also teamed up with the Federal Trade Commission to eradicate what she describes as “useless” regulations.
“We opened up a docket and we said to anybody interested with expertise in the area, tell us the regulations that you’re aware that are hindering competition — and the ways in which that could be fixed. Because we want to support free market competition,” Slater said. “That’s the goal here.”
Another tool is using amicus briefs to strategically influence federal court cases, like they have done in Texas v. BlackRock — a high-profile antitrust lawsuit where states allege major investors like BlackRock colluded to reduce coal production, raising energy prices.
She said it is a way of supporting American companies and administration policies with relatively inexpensive but high-impact interventions.
Slater, who was born in Dublin and studied at Oxford, moved to the US in 2003 and worked as a trial attorney at the FTC for a decade. She held positions at the Internet Association, Fox Corporation, Roku and, during the first Trump administration, the National Economic Council, before advising JD Vance on antitrust issues while he was an Ohio senator.
She’s excited moving beyond the cases left to her by her predecessor.
“A priority for me is health care,” she told me. “We’re looking to set a positive agenda around drug pricing and health care more broadly.
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