Shifts in FTC Leadership, Big Tech Dynamics, and the Healthcare Deal Market: Insights from Holly Buckley of McGuireWoods LLP 1-23-25
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What insights does Holly Buckley share about the FTC?
This is Scott Becker with the Becker Private Equity and Business Podcast. Again, we try and teach and entertain. We try and bring you brilliant guests each week, business-to-business podcasts and webinars. We're thrilled today to be joined by Holly Buckley. Holly's the chair of the National Healthcare Department at McGuire-Woods. And she's going to talk to us some about sort of this evolution from the Biden administration to the Trump administration and what this likely means for the FTC, where there's been such a fascinating period of time at the FTC, the Federal Trade Commission, and so forth. Take a second, Holly. Tell us a little bit about, why don't you take a second and introduce yourself first, and then talk to us about the impact of the new administration on the FTC.
Hey Scott, thanks as always for having me on. Holly Buckley, I chair the healthcare group at McGuire Woods, spend a fair amount of my time working in private equity transactions as well as general provider advising and transactional work. So a pleasure to be on. And I've been trying to keep my eye on what's happening at the FTC. It's been a really interesting past few years with Lena Khan at the helm. The FTC has become much more aggressive and some may say activist. And a big focus of many heading into this election was a focus on on Lina Khan and whether she would still be in with a new administration or even if Kamala had won. And with Trump coming in, Lina Khan is out, and Andrew Ferguson, who is a commissioner at the FTC, is the new head of the FTC. And there's also now a Republican majority on the commission. And so there's a lot of eyes in terms of what's going to be happening as we go forward. And we don't really know yet.
But I think some sources have reported that there's likely to be a continued focus and scrutiny on the dominance of the big tech platforms, which I think is really interesting in light of some of the alliances that Trump's been forging with some of the big tech leaders that may be a connection there. And it'll be interesting to see how much scrutiny those big tech companies do continue to get from the FTC in light of some of the dynamics in Washington right now.
And talk about that for a second, because under the Biden administration, It seems like once these platforms work so hard to stay close to the Biden administration and avoid irritating the Biden administration, you know, and all kinds of discussions of comments back and forth and dialogue between the tech companies and the Biden administration. Now you've got the opposite happening. These tech companies that were so pro-Biden, anti-Trump. I'll take Twitter aside because Twitter was bought by Elon Musk as part of this response to Trump. what he viewed as the censorship of free speech. But talk about, you know, now you've got Mark Zuckerberg, who seemed to have, you know, to use the phrase from Game of Thrones, bent the knee to the Biden administration.
Now he seems to be bending the knee to the Trump administration. Aside from everything else, isn't that a despicable part of politics that now you've got these big businesses that feel they have to bend the knee to whoever's in charge that has that big an impact on their business.
Yeah, no, I think it is very interesting. And I listened to a podcast the other day. It was a New York Times one. And there was a discussion with Mark Anderson, who was kind of discussing these dynamics and kind of the switch. And it... He described it much more as something that had happened over time, over kind of the last 10 years with kind of the left and its impact on tech companies and kind of anti-business perspectives and less of an old Trump one. And so now everyone is kind of flip-flopping over. It was described very differently, but I do think it's an interesting dynamic where you had Silicon Valley, which was a very... um reliably left-leaning constituency and now we are seeing a lot of silicon valley leadership very much um flipping to the right and um very uh vocally and um without any kind of hesitation seemingly, flipping to the right and cozying up with Trump.
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