After securing the New York City mayoral race Tuesday night, Democrat Zohran Mamdani announced that former Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chair Lina Khan will serve as one of four co-chairs on his transition team.
Khan, who led the federal antitrust and competition agency under the Biden administration, has been accused by some conservatives of weaponizing the FTC for partisan purposes during her tenure. Mamdani’s transition website hails the former regulator as the “nation’s leading antimonopoly champion.”
The former FTC chair will serve on an all-female transition team appointed by Mamdani, a self-described democratic socialist who campaigned on raising taxes on corporations and on “richer and whiter” neighborhoods.
“What we saw last night was New Yorkers not just electing a new mayor, but clearly rejecting a politics where outsized corporate power and money too often end up dictating our politics,” Khan said Wednesday.
Like Mamdani, who was elected mayor of the nation’s largest city at just 34 years old, Khan was confirmed as FTC chair at only 32. During her tenure, Khan expanded the FTC’s role, pushing to increase rulemaking authority, while allegedly curbing the flow of information to the agency’s staff and even to fellow commissioners.
One former Republican FTC commissioner, Christine Wilson, resigned in 2023, saying she would not help Khan and her “abuses of government power” by staying in her position. Wilson had alleged Khan kept her in the dark in certain merger review cases, saying she had to ask the companies she was reviewing for documents related to the merger review because internal FTC sources would not provide them.
Under Khan, the FTC pursued multiple antimonopoly cases, including against both Meta and Amazon. Some on the right criticized her for using the agency as a political tool, claiming her policies slowed major deals and created uncertainty. A House Judiciary report in October 2024 accused Khan of weaponizing the agency against Elon Musk’s X in an effort to “punish” Musk and his company for revealing the Biden-Harris administration’s censorship.
However, Khan’s crackdown on BigTech firms drew support from others on the right, including Vice President JD Vance, who called her “one of the few people in the Biden administration who I think is doing a pretty good job,” during a conference in 2024. He reiterated that point in August 2024, saying Khan has “been very smart about trying to go after some of these big tech companies that monopolize what we’re allowed to say in our own country.”
Khan will co-chair the transition alongside Grace Bonilla, president of United Way of New York City; Maria Torres-Springer, former deputy mayor; and Melanie Hartzog, president of the New York Foundling.
Mamdani did not respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
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