30 Minutes With… Lina Khan

The FTC’s very young new boss thinks corporations are abusing their power. To fight them, she’s consolidating some clout of her own.

- By Nancy Scola

Lina Khan was an associate professor at Columbia Law, working remotely from Texas, when she found out that President Joe Biden wanted her on the Federal Trade Commission. She was 32, just a handful of years out of law school, and the prospect of being one of five commissioners on the panel was a coup. Then the record skipped. At some point after her confirmation hearing, Khan says, she was “pretty startled” to learn that the administration would tap her to chair the commission—a century-old agency with 1,100 employees, a $384 million budget, and, she’d argue, a set of priorities that went disastrously astray some 40 years ago.

“I think it’s fair to say that my tenure here represents change in a whole host of dimensions,” Khan told me. “And I think change can be hard.” Dressed in a dark-blue blazer, she was sitting in her office at FTC headquarters in Washington, a temporary space that overlooks a 12-foot statue of a musclebound behemoth restraining a raging stallion. Man Controlling Trade, it’s called. Khan, who is seven years younger than the certified D.C. wunderkind Pete Buttigieg, is now indisputably the most powerful figure in the anti-monopoly vanguard. She gives a clarifying voice to the idea that superconcentrated corporate power is a threat to ordinary Americans—not just to our economic well-being but to our freedoms.