Regulation, Prohibition, and Litigation: Joe Biden’s Busy Lame-Duck Period
The Biden administration has come to an end not with a bang, nor a whimper—but with a frenzied rush of new regulations, lawsuits, and executive orders.
Some are likely to be quickly reversed when the Trump presidency begins next week. Many others will not.
The latest in that string of last-second executive actions was a lawsuit filed by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) on Wednesday against Deere & Company, the manufacturer of John Deere tractors and other farm equipment. The lawsuit alleges that Deere has used proprietary software to ensure that only the company’s authorized dealers can conduct repairs on the computer systems that run much of modern farm equipment.
The lawsuit is a potentially big showdown for the so-called right-to-repair movement, which is seeking laws and court opinions that prevent companies from using those sorts of restrictive software components to force consumers into using certain repair services. Despite much of the FTC’s track record over the past four years, this might actually be a useful and consumer-friendly development.
But the process matters, and rushing this lawsuit out the door in the final days of the Biden administration is likely to harm its chances of succeeding. As Deere noted in a statement, the lawsuit seems to misrepresent some basic facts about what repair services customers can do on their own. In a dissenting statement, FTC Commissioner Andrew Ferguson (who will become chairman of the agency after Donald Trump is sworn in) condemned the effort as “the result of brazen partisanship…taken in haste to beat President Trump into office.”
In other words, this looks more like a performative final flourish by outgoing FTC Chairwoman Lina Khan rather than a serious attempt at improving consumer welfare.
You might say the same thing about many of the Biden administration’s lame-duck activities—and there have been a lot of them.
In just the past 15 days, President Joe Biden or his appointees have blocked the sale of U.S. Steel, forbidden oil drilling in a huge swath of coastal waters, banned mining on federal lands in California, and restricted American companies’ sales of advanced computer chips. Each of those actions will directly (in the case of U.S. Steel) or indirectly harm American businesses by limiting how and where they engage in commerce.
Biden’s team has also meddled with prices and personal finances. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) issued new rules forbidding medical debt from being taken into account when credit sc
Article from Reason.com
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