The Scoop
Lina Khan thinks beers at Yankee Stadium are too expensive — and that she has the law on her side.
Since the progressive antitrust crusader was added to Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s transition team, the business community she harangued as chair of President Joe Biden’s Federal Trade Commission has been puzzling over what she might be up to. Local politics, after all, is a strange soapbox for trustbusting, where federal law reigns.
People familiar with the transition, and her thinking, have an answer: Khan has been scouring city and state laws — some overlooked by past mayors and some too new to have been tested yet — for legal footing for Mamdani’s priorities. It’s a skill set the Yale-trained lawyer wielded while running the FTC, where she dusted off laws, some dating from the early 20th century, and sued companies under novel theories of harm. “Excavating and enforcing the law” is how one transition adviser put it.
It’s a return for Khan to her roots as a legal scholar, which predate her turn as the regulator most despised by Wall Street. She rose to prominence after writing an academic paper in 2017 that laid out the monopoly case against Amazon, a theory she tested in court at the FTC. The agency won a $2.5 billion settlement against Amazon for the byzantine process of canceling its Prime subscription, and is set to take a separate monopoly case to trial in 2027.
In her new role, Khan has identified an early avenue in a 56-year-old NYC prohibition on business practices deemed “unconscionable” — a designation expansive enough to delight any regulator. Meant to protect captive consumers who lack other options for a particular good, the law has rarely been used; the only example of note this century appears to have been its use against retailers price-gouging for face masks in March 2020.
Khan has privately discussed targeting hospitals that bill patients for painkillers available more cheaply at corner drugstores and sports stadiums charging nosebleed prices for concessions, the people said. Other avenues for enforcement include a new state law that requires companies to tell customers when they are using algorithmic pricing. The law took effect this week, forcing Uber and DoorDash to start disclosing, but the incoming Mamdani administration plans to police laggards.
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The playbook is one Khan ran at the FTC, where she made use of forgotten laws in pursuit of Biden’s progressive agenda.
One of her first moves was reviving a practice, essentially abandoned in the 1970s, of formally putting companies on notice that the agency thought they might be breaking the law. These “notices of penalty offense” — the antitrust equivalent of a warning to tread carefully — had been issued just once since 1999 before Khan took control of the agency in 2021. She sent thousands of them, warning Uber and Lyft against promising money-making opportunities they couldn’t deliver; Applebee’s and Hertz against airing ads that misrepresented their customer experiences; and vitamin manufacturers against making unsubstantiated health claims.
She also brought the first case in more than 20 years under a 1936 law, the Robinson-Patman Act, that makes it illegal for distributors to offer better terms to, for example, Walmart than to a corner store.
“One thing that was really shocking to me at the FTC was just how much dormant and unused and underused authorities had just been on the books,” Khan said last week at an event hosted by Pod Save America parent Crooked Media. She said her work for Mamdani will focus “on things like: how do we make sure that we have a full accounting of all of the laws and authorities that the mayor can unilaterally deploy.”
Liz’s view
Khan and Mamdani, in this way, are outcome-oriented populists in the mold of President Donald Trump, who has repurposed executive powers in new ways. He has used emergency powers to enact tariffs and the IRS’ little-wielded authority over nonprofits to crack down on universities. His lawsuit against CBS News was legally novel, recasting a mundane video edit as an in-kind political contribution to Kamala Harris.
While Khan is already being tagged a socialist, and was seen during her tenure as specifically hostile to big American business, her policies are deeply capitalist. She wants more competition, not less, and to see companies duking it out on the merits of their goods and services, not their reach over consumers, some of whom — Yankees fans, for example — have no other options.
Mamdani has identified a problem — New York is way too expensive — but not a clear villain. While his campaign had some mild indictments of “corporate greed,” attempts by his allies to skewer big business clashed with Mamdani’s relentlessly positive smile-fest. It’s unclear whether that approach to solving the affordability problem can last with Khan in City Hall, but her legalistic approach gives it legs.
Room for Disagreement
“I’m sure there are existing laws and regulations that could be used to exert power and influence, but because of the subservient structure of the city to the state, those are going to be fewer and farther between,” said Jordan Barowitz, a former aide to Mayor Michael Bloomberg and a longtime adviser to city leaders.