Biden’s antimonopoly warrior girds for 2024

Kirk Vartan, owner of the Bay Area pizza shop A Slice of New York, sat in the break room of a wholesale warehouse and started venting about how hard it is for him to buy 7-Up.

He can only stock a few cans at a time, he said, while grocery stores nearby have pallets of newly delivered soda. “It’s like, ‘what the hell guys, you just told me you don’t have it.’ I go down the street and it’s on sale,” he said.

Sitting about eight feet away, intently listening and taking copious notes in a small black book, was Lina Khan, chair of the Federal Trade Commission.

In Washington, Khan is one of the city’s most powerful and elusive presences — a creative legal thinker helping reshape policy in real time, as part of President Joe Biden’s pitched battle against American corporate power. Her success fighting some of the world’s largest corporations on behalf of consumers and small businesses will help shape his legacy in a crucial campaign year. In September, the FTC sued the online retail giant Amazon, launching one of the highest-profile antitrust cases in years. Beyond that, her agency has pushed into fights on a dizzying number of fronts, from an effort to ban most non-compete employment agreements to a suit against anesthesiologists and their private equity backers for raising prices. It has brought home a flurry of wins at the end of the year.