June 22, 2026, 12:31 GMT | Comment
The chairman of the
US Federal Trade Commission, Andrew Ferguson, has ordered the agency's antitrust and consumer protection staff to scrutinize whether a 1995 FTC policy that settlement orders sunset only after 20 years still makes sense. Compared to other federal enforcers such as the
US Securities and Exchange Commission and the
US Department of Justice, the FTC's 20-year policy for consent orders "is not in step with what the rest of the government is doing.”
The chairman of the US Federal Trade Commission said the agency’s three-decade practice of setting a default 20-year term on administrative orders for antitrust and consumer protection settlements may be a suit of clothes that no longer fits the agency and the economy.
In an interview with MLex, Andrew Ferguson said that after taking the helm of the FTC in early 2025, he quickly tasked staff in the Bureau of Competition and the Bureau of Consumer Protection to look at sister agencies such as the Securities and Exchange Commission, the US Department of Justice, the Commodities Futures Trading Commission and the
Federal Communications Commission to see if the FTC’s 20-year default was in concert with the practice of other federal agencies.
Ferguson said he questions whether having a default term of any length makes sense.
“Having a blanket rule of 20 years across the board is probably not like a well-fitted piece of clothing,” Ferguson said in a recent interview in his office at FTC headquarters. “There are going to be some circumstances in which conduct is so egregious that 20 years is probably necessary, but that is surely not in all of them. I think you'll see if you look at the orders that we've issued under my chairmanship, they haven't all been 20. A lot of them have departed from that, because my view is that the order length should fit the crime and the risk of recurrence.”
For an organization whose main business is fraudulent, a 20-year order could be “perfectly acceptable,” he said.
But for a legitimate business that has a non-flagrant violation of the law in the course of the legitimate transaction of business, “20 years does not seem like it's probably necessary,” Ferguson said. “These businesses have a strong incentive to, A, obey the law generally, but B, to get their act in order once we have discovered and successfully litigated the question.”
— Twenty-year standard —
Consent orders lasting 20 years are the standard for Big Tech privacy and data security violations settled by the FTC, with two-decade oversight orders in place for
Google,
Meta Platforms, Snap,
Uber Technologies and X, the former
Twitter. X filed a petition in May to challenge an FTC 20-year order that renewed in 2022 when the FTC said Twitter violated an earlier 2011 order by taking users’ email address and phone numbers supplied for security purposes and repurposing that data without consent to target advertising (see
here).
Private equity firm Welsh Carson, Anderson & Stowe, as of May 2025, was bound by a 20-year consent order to limit its involvement in
US Anesthesia Partners and notify the FTC of future hospital-based practice investments.
Since June 2023,
Anchor Glass Container Corp has been subject to a 20-year consent order prohibiting the company and its owners from enforcing or maintaining non-compete agreements for hundreds of employee classifications.
There are also multiple merger divestitures that remain active, such as in the case of Boeing and
Spirit AeroSystems or
Valvoline and Greenbriar, as well as structural settlements involving long-term reporting, firewall, and divestiture maintenance terms.
Prior to 1995, there were no time limits for FTC administrative consumer protection or antitrust orders. Under Chairman Robert Pitofsky, however, the FTC decided in 1996 to sunset administrative orders after 20 years as “part of the agency's continuing effort to eliminate outmoded or unnecessary regulatory requirements in an era when markets change rapidly and companies regularly change hands or exchange corporate cultures" (see
here).
The FTC sunset policy does not apply to federal district court orders. The FTC has said that many of these orders are against defendants involved in hard-core fraud, and that the Commission has little basis on which to judge whether such orders become unnecessary after 20 years.
Ferguson said that 31 years after the policy change under Pitofsky, it’s time to revisit the issue, and for more than six months, the FTC antitrust and consumer protection staffs have been researching whether the FTC should issue a policy statement, as the Pitofsky FTC did.
“One of the first things I did when I became chairman was, ‘Can we please look around at our sister agencies that have administrative orders in addition to the power to obtain consent decrees or litigated judgments in district court, and what are they doing?’” Ferguson told MLex. “Twenty is not in step with what the rest of the government is doing.”
Ferguson said he wants the staff to determine first whether the FTC is “wildly out of step” with other federal enforcers.
“It became clear that we definitely are on the longer end of the federal enforcement spectrum, and that's why I told both Bureaus [of Competition and Consumer Protection] I want real work on this to see if we, A, we do need to revisit it, and B, what should that revisiting look like, and what's the right answer?” he said.
X argued in the petition it filed in mid-May that the FTC privacy oversight order is an unwarranted “substantial burden” that hampers innovation and potentially limits free expression on the social media platform.
Regarding free expression, “the public interest in terminating the Order may well be at its apex here — because the Order in question functions as a loaded gun pointed at constitutionally protected expression,” X said in the petition (see
here).
X is not challenging the FTC’s 20-year policy, but the fairness of its specific consent order. Ferguson declined to comment on the petition because it is in a 30-day public comment period that lasts until July 2. He said he had not yet read the X petition.
Ferguson said, however, that he’s not concerned about the optics of a company owned by Elon Musk, an ally of US President Donald Trump, seeking regulatory relief from an agency that now refers to itself as the “Trump-Vance FTC.”
“My concern is following the law,” he said.
“If they have successfully staked a claim that our orders are not consistent with our practice, or with the law, or with the concerns that led to the orders in the first place, then I will follow the law on this,” Ferguson said. “We have reduced order lengths in other [cases]. We have amended orders since I came in, but only because they came in and made a solid argument that the order was lawless.”
— Critics —
Critics of FTC 20-year orders say the speed of change in a 21st-Centry digital economy makes a two-decade term too long.
“Twenty years ago, or 30 years ago, things weren’t changing so quickly. In this environment, where change is so shockingly fast, these orders should be shorter to encourage innovation, to reduce the impact on legitimate business operations, and to promote competition,” said John E. Villafranco, a lawyer with the firm
Kelley Drye & Warren, who co-authored a white paper last year arguing for reform options including a 10-year-sunset for FTC compliance orders (see
here).
Ferguson said there is no timetable for the FTC to complete its review of the term for consent orders, but he has been concerned about the 20-year order policy since he was a minority commissioner under Chair Lina Khan. Congress has also expressed concern
“You can imagine a world which we issue a policy statement that says like 20 is no longer the presumptive length. It’s something less,” he said. “You can imagine a policy statement where we say, we aren't going to have a presumptive length. We're going to tailor orders to fit the crime and the likely risk of recurrence.”
“If that's where markets have moved and where government enforcement expectations have moved,” Ferguson added, “there's no reason for the FTC to be wildly out of step with that.”
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