While there has been no shortage of attention on many of the dubious last-minute actions by the Biden administration, the latest shoe to drop might just take the cake. Last week, a bombshell report from The Information revealed that Lina Khan, the leftist ideologue Biden installed as the chair of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), was communicating with Temu, a Chinese-owned company and rival of Amazon, in an attempt to gather damaging information on the latter.
You read that right. Khan was so obsessed with her crusade against Amazon, born and based in Seattle, that she was willing to collude with a foreign company with connections to the Chinese Communist Party. Under China’s National Intelligence Law, Temu must provide data – collected both domestically and abroad – to the CCP.
According to a report from the U.S. House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, Temu skirts requirements of the Uyghur Forced Labor Production Act (UFLPA), a bipartisan U.S. law intended to prevent products linked to Uyghur Muslim slave labor in China from entering U.S. markets.
So what in the world would compel Khan, who took an oath promising to protect America from all enemies, foreign and domestic, to work with a company connected to a government who has declared the global spread of Communism, “the party’s supreme ideal and ultimate objective”?
The answer is blindness to her own ideology.
Khan burst onto the national scene as an avowed opponent of Amazon. Without her blistering and borderline obsession with the company, it’s difficult to envision her rapid rise to the head of the FTC at the age of 32 in 2021. In Khan’s eyes, Amazon represented all that was broken with American antitrust laws. In 2017, she authored an article in Yale Law Journal excoriating the company for keeping prices too low.
Khan’s real target was the “consumer welfare standard,” which as its name suggests, prioritizes American consumers as a north star for antitrust policy. In a nutshell, the consumer welfare standard keeps government regulators off the backs and out of the business of private companies so long as the interests of consumers are being served.
In a free and fair marketplace, consumers will naturally shift to competitors if they can get a better deal elsewhere. Don’t like Prime? Go check out Target or Walmart, both of which have invested and emulated Amazon’s fast and convenient shipping methods in recent years.
Khan had a different view. She weaponized her regulatory authority to dismantle Amazon with a sweeping landmark lawsuit in 2023. (Other homegrown success stories like Meta and Microsoft also found themselves targets of Khan’s).
Then, in December 2024 as the Biden Administration was winding down and Khan’s tenure was coming to an end, the communication between the FTC and Temu reportedly took place.
Any citizen concerned about the threat from China and their spy balloons should be outraged at this incident. Any member of Congress, whose bipartisan bill forcing TikTok divestiture from its suspected ties to the CCP, was one of the few areas of common ground in recent years, should take note and investigate.
A new sheriff may be calling the shots at the FTC, but Khan remained on the job through Jan. 31. Sadly, this collusion with Temu wasn’t an isolated incident. Khan faced congressional inquiries about reported cooperation with regulators from the European Union, again in an effort to harm American innovators.
Whatever happens, this won’t be the last we hear of Temu. Their advertising during the last Super Bowl caught attention. In 2023, they became the most downloaded eCommerce app.
Next time you’re wondering just how low leftist regulators will stoop in their quest to harm American free enterprise, it’s a pretty good bet Lina Khan’s name will be in the conversation. Thankfully, her reign of terror at the FTC has come to an end. The long-term harm from her actions, especially the brazen willingness to collude with hostile foreign actors, remains an open question.
A former United States Senator and Ambassador, Scott Brown is the chair of the Competitiveness Coalition
