New FTC Chair Lina Khan Appoints Antitrust Chief, Other Key Staffers

Lina Khan, the new chair of the Federal Trade Commission, on Thursday named three top staff members amid one of the most radical shifts in the agency’s history, according to a memo viewed by The Information.

Holly Vedova, who was an adviser to FTC commissioner Rohit Chopra, a Democrat, on antitrust issues, is now the acting director of the agency’s Bureau of Competition, which oversees all antitrust enforcement at the agency. Sam Levine, another Chopra adviser, is now the acting director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection, which oversees privacy and consumer fraud cases. And Erie Meyer, who is a technical and policy adviser to Chopra, will be the FTC’s chief technologist, which provides technical research for enforcement and policy decisions. Meyer will also serve as a policy adviser to Khan.

All three individuals worked for Chopra, who was also Khan’s boss in 2018 when she was an adviser on his team for several months. Chopra became one of Khan’s key allies and lobbied for her to lead the agency because of her expansive view of antitrust enforcement against the likes of Amazon and other big tech companies. The FTC last year filed antitrust lawsuits against Facebook and is currently probing the practices of Amazon as well as chip developer Broadcom. (Chopra is looking to leave the FTC to become head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an appointment that is pending before the Senate.)