Attorneys at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) asked a federal judge Wednesday to delay its consumer protection trial against Amazon by two months, saying that staffing losses and a possible office move could hinder its ability to prepare.
“We have lost employees in the agency, in our division and on our case team,” FTC attorney Jonathan Cohen said at a status hearing in Washington, according to CNBC. Cohen also warned that a potential sudden office move for the agency could disrupt its preparation, CNBC reports.
The FTC recently terminated around a dozen probationary staffers, The Verge first reported. It’s so far been spared from some of the wider cuts fueled by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which have occurred at agencies including the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and Department of Education. FTC staff were recently told by DOGE they’d need to move to an office it cleared out from the US Agency for International Development (USAID) in the coming months, Bloomberg reported.
Responding to Judge John Chun’s question about how the FTC’s resource issue “will be different in two months,” Cohen acknowledged he “cannot guarantee if things won’t be even worse,” CNBC reports. “But there’s a lot of reason to believe … we may have been through the brunt of it, at least for a little while.”
The FTC filed suit against Amazon in June 2023, under the previous Democratic chair Lina Khan. The agency alleged that Amazon used design tricks known as dark patterns to deceive millions of customers into signing up for its Prime subscription, and made it difficult to unsubscribe. Under Khan, the FTC also separately filed an antitrust complaint against Amazon. Both those cases are now under the stewardship of the new Republican FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson, who’s signaled both loyalty toward President Trump and his policies, and combativeness toward Big Tech. Amazon founder and executive chairman Jeff Bezos has recently cozied up to Trump, attending his inauguration alongside other tech CEOs after Amazon gave $1 million to his inauguration fund.
The Amazon Prime trial was initially scheduled to begin on September 22nd. John Hueston, arguing on Amazon’s behalf, reportedly pushed back on the FTC’s attempt to delay the trial, saying that the government hasn’t shown that it doesn’t have the resources to proceed as scheduled. “What I heard is that they’ve got the whole trial team still intact. Maybe there’s going to be an office move,” Hueston said, as reported by CNBC. “And by the way, both in government and private sector, I’ve never heard of an office move being more than a few days disruptive.”
