Biden to Urge More Scrutiny of Big Business

WASHINGTON — President Biden on Friday will sign an executive order aimed at reducing corporate concentration across the economy, encouraging federal agencies to take a wide range of actions, including more closely scrutinizing the tech industry, cracking down on high fees charged by sea shippers and allowing hearing aids to be sold over the counter.

The order reflects the administration’s growing embrace of warnings by some economists that declining competition is hobbling the economy’s vitality, raising prices and reducing choices for consumers in key areas, while dampening pay and restricting freedom to change jobs for workers.

But Mr. Biden may find challenges in addressing that competition decline across diverse sectors of the economy — including Silicon Valley, Wall Street, chain restaurants and large hospital networks — solely through executive action. Experts warn that in many areas, the president will need to work with Congress to change federal laws if he hopes to have more success than former President Donald J. Trump, who also issued competition-focused executive orders and saw limited results from them.

Senior administration officials acknowledged the limitations of executive authority in interviews this week, but said the order chose actions, like directing federal regulators to take steps to boost competition in several areas, that had the best chance of success in driving change across the economy.

One part of the order will tell the federal agencies that approve mergers that they should update their guidance for vetting deals to better capture Silicon Valley’s business models. Another asks the Federal Communications Commission to reinstate net neutrality rules for broadband providers. Yet another asks the Federal Trade Commission to stop manufacturers from blocking farmers from repairing their tractors on their own.

Other parts will target health care at several levels. The order will support states and tribal governments in importing lower-cost prescription drugs from Canada, push for regulations issued this year to allow hearing aides to be sold over the counter and ask the F.T.C. and the Justice Department to more stringently scrutinize hospital mergers to ensure patients are not harmed by them.

The order will also encourage the F.T.C. to ban or limit noncompete agreements, which employers have increasingly used in recent years to try to inhibit their workers’ ability to quit for a better job. It encourages the commission to also ban “unnecessary” occupational licensing restrictions, which can restrict workers’ ability to find new work, especially across state lines. And it encourages both the commission and the Justice Department to further restrict the ability of employers to share information on worker pay in ways that might amount to collusion.

More broadly, the executive order encourages antitrust regulators to consider the ways that mergers might contribute to monopsonies, or industries in which workers have few choices of where to work and therefore lack leverage to negotiate higher wages or better benefits.

It will create a White House Competition Council, led by Brian Deese, the director of the National Economic Council, which will “coordinate the federal government’s response to the rising power of large corporations in the economy,” administration officials said in a news release.

Some White House officials hope the order will hark back to the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who highlighted the rise of big business and installed government officials opposed to concentration, said people familiar with the matter.

The order is a victory for the growing group of lawmakers, academics and rival companies who say government regulators failed to check the growth of corporate America for decades, instead aligning themselves with a conservative view of the law that set a high standard for when the government should block mergers or break up monopolies.

They say that policymakers need to aggressively enforce antitrust laws and possibly rewrite them entirely. Without drastic action, they argue, consumers will have less choice, suppliers of bigger companies will get squeezed and giant corporations will only grow larger.

Mr. Biden has already put some vocal critics of corporate power in leadership positions. In the White House, he appointed Tim Wu, a Columbia University law professor and outspoken proponent of breaking up companies like Facebook, as a special adviser on competition. He named Lina Khan as chair of the Federal Trade Commission. Ms. Khan worked on a House antitrust investigation into Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google and earlier in her career wrote about critically concentration in other industries, like candy manufacturing and agriculture.

But Mr. Biden’s administration is limited in its reach. The Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Communications Commission are independent agencies that enforce existing antitrust and communications laws. He has also not yet nominated someone to lead the Department of Justice’s antitrust division, a key position in determining the administration’s position on competition issues.

House lawmakers have advanced a handful of proposals to strengthen the agencies’ hands when it comes to Big Tech, but those bills are expected to face fierce resistance. Many of the measures in the executive order, which Mr. Biden will sign on Friday, don’t necessarily need an act of Congress to broaden the agencies’ abilities. In many cases, regulators have held back on enforcing existing laws and creating new rules, said people familiar with the White House’s thinking.

One of the targets of the executive order are mergers where big tech companies buy small companies that could become fierce competitors, snuffing out a rival before it gets off the ground. The directives encourage the agencies to revisit the guidelines they use to assess proposed deals, including when a company is buying a young competitor or a major cache of data that could help it reach dominance.

The order will also ask the F.C.C. to adopt new restrictions on the practices of broadband internet providers like Comcast, AT&T and Verizon. Activists have long said consumers have too few choices, and pay too much money, for internet service.

Mr. Biden will also encourage the F.C.C. to reinstitute so-called net neutrality rules that barred internet providers from blocking certain content, slowing down its delivery or letting clients pay more to have their content delivered faster. The agency adopted the rules during the Obama administration and then rolled them back under President Donald J. Trump.

Cecilia Kang contributed reporting.