The Federal Trade Commission has enabled employers to suppress wages by refusing to defend a ban on noncompete agreements in court.Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here to get The Daily Prospect Monday through Friday. [link removed]

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**SEPTEMBER 09, 2025**

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No action exposes the lie that MAGA Republicans are a workers party than the recent dropping of the defense of the nationwide ban on noncompete agreements, which are transparent attempts to suppress worker wages [link removed]. It's also typical of Donald Trump that his Federal Trade Commission is pretending to care about noncompetes while giving up on the best way to prevent them, And as a coup de grace, Trump got the Supreme Court to back up his firing of the one FTC official who called him out for harming workers. It's all of Trump 2.0 in a microcosm.

**– David Dayen, executive editor**

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MATTIE NERETIN/SIPA USA VIA AP IMAGES

Trump Lets Bosses Grab $400 Billion in Worker Pay [link removed]

Becca Kelly Slaughter, a commissioner at the Federal Trade Commission, got her job back last Wednesday. She immediately requested a vote [link removed] to restore the FTC’s “click to cancel” rule, which would make it easier to end recurring subscriptions. On Friday, she issued a dissent [link removed] in the FTC’s decision to stop defending its ban on employee noncompete agreements in federal court. In just a few days, she had fulfilled the mission of the agency of protecting workers and consumers.

So by Monday, she was out of a job again.

U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts, in a perverse ruling at odds with a 90-year-old direct precedent, issued a stay [link removed] of a D.C. district court’s order reversing the illegal firing of Slaughter by President Trump earlier this year. This effectively allows Trump to fire Slaughter for now, pending ongoing review of the case.

Trump, and therefore Roberts, doesn’t want a dissenting voice at the FTC pointing out all the ways that he is governing by and for the wealthy and immiserating ordinary people in the process. So Slaughter had to go, and quickly. Trump’s lapdog in black robes eagerly complied with the request.

The biggest example of this is the FTC’s surrender on the noncompete ban, one of the signature achievements of the agency under Lina Khan. Noncompete clauses stuck into employment contracts prohibit workers from leaving to join another company in the same field for a prescribed period. While originally used for top executives with proprietary information about businesses, they have more recently been imposed on pet groomers [link removed], fast-food workers [link removed], janitors [link removed], and more. About 1 in 5 workers have a noncompete agreement in their employment contract.

The goal is obvious: to suppress wages by preventing the free movement of labor that might create competition for their services. One could even say this is against capitalism as traditionally understood; economists in the mold of Adam Smith typically argue the market for labor is supposed to be open and competitive, to incentivize the most productive use of it. The FTC estimated that workers would gain $400 billion over a decade from this rule, in the form of higher wages.

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