P. M. BRIEFING : Administration Vows Tougher Enforcement of Antitrust Laws
The Bush Administration today announced it will toughen enforcement of federal antitrust laws, pushing for stiffer penalties for violators and giving more scrutiny to business mergers.
Administration officials also said the government will focus its antitrust effort on certain industries, including health care and airlines, and evaluate its own policies to see whether they hurt competition.
James Rill, who heads the antitrust division in the U.S. Justice Department, and Janet Steiger, chairwoman of the Federal Trade Commission, discussed the government’s antitrust policies during a conference at Harvard Law School.
The Reagan Administration--which espoused free-market economic and business policies--was widely considered relatively lax in enforcing federal antitrust law, a stance critics say was a key factor in the merger mania of the 1980s.
Steiger said that since the early 1980s, a perception has grown that antitrust enforcement is “a pale shadow of what it once was.”
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