The Federal Trade Commission doesn’t have any staffing issues that will impact its ability to face Amazon in trial after all, an attorney for the government said in a filing to a federal court, hours after saying they needed a two-month delay.
The surprising letter appeared Wednesday in the docket for the FTC’s deceptive practices lawsuit accusing Amazon of misleading consumers with its Prime sign-up and cancellation flow. At a hearing earlier that day, FTC attorney Jonathan Cohen told Judge John Chun that they needed to push the trial start date back from September 22nd, since, “we have lost employees in the agency, in our division and on our case team,” CNBC reported. Just hours later, Cohen filed a signed letter to “clarify” his statement.
“I was wrong,” Cohen writes. “The Commission does not have resource constraints and we are fully prepared to litigate this case. Please be assured that the FTC will meet whatever schedule and deadlines the court sets.”
It’s not clear what happened in the hours between Cohen’s statement to the court and the letter being filed. And while resource constraints for the enforcement agencies are not entirely out of the ordinary, Cohen’s initial comments came amidst the Department of Government Efficiency’s push to make workforce cuts across agencies. So far, the FTC has not seen some of the sweeping cuts experienced by the Department of Education or US Agency for International Development (USAID), but The Verge reported that more than a dozen probationary staffers across the FTC were cut in late February.
The flip-flop raises questions about what the true impact of government cuts will mean for enforcement agencies like the FTC. At her nomination hearing to lead the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division, Gail Slater did not directly commit to a direction in ongoing tech antitrust litigation, noting she’d need to evaluate resources once confirmed. So far, DOGE’s impact has forced many agencies to attempt to do more with less.
