Since she arrived at the FTC and, surprisingly, became its chair, Lina Khan has been a lightning rod inside and outside the agency. In 2022, staff morale cratered in internal surveys. Outside the agency, Khan has taken heat from and been bolstered by all sides of the political and economic spectrum. The divide over Khan shows how the left and the right can sometimes agree, even as they are divided.

United and Divided

Recently, billionaire supporters of Kamala Harris (Mark Cuban, Barry Diller, and Reid Hoffman) said Khan should not be reappointed. Many Republicans in Congress have also opposed Khan’s aggressive enforcement and questionable management.

As Cristiano Lima-Strong wrote in the Washington Post, “…the highly publicized nature of the dispute — now the topic of national op-eds and “60 Minutes” specials — is practically unheard of for an agency head at this stage in the race, when campaigns are just starting to field questions about who would fill higher-profile Cabinet roles.”

Khan has strong defenders on the left. Rushing to Khan’s defense have been liberal stalwarts, like Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Khan’s chief patron, Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), as well as Rep. Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). But you can find supporters among some Republicans, too.

Even as Donald Trump has called for Khan’s removal, his running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), said that Khan is “one of the few people in the Biden administration that I actually think is doing a pretty good job.” The Wall Street Journal pointed out that the “’Khanservatives,’ as they call themselves, tend to be younger and Trumpier, part of the growing ranks of Republicans who question unfettered markets and see big corporations as an adversary to their constituents.” Included on this list is U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz (D-FL). Former Attorney General William Barr said that Khan “has done a good job of picking up the baton and running with it.”

Much of the right’s support for Khan comes when the FTC is engaged on the antitrust side of its two-pronged mission, and less so on its consumer protection side. U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), another Khanservative has supported legislation to, as the WSJ noted, “strengthen antitrust enforcement, including legislation aimed at breaking up meatpacking monopolies, banning large corporate mergers, giving more power to the FTC and bolstering penalties for anticompetitive conduct.”

Politics Makes Strange Bedfellows

As a long-time advocate for the consumer reporting industry, often focusing on privacy, data security, and data broker issues, I see the alignment of conservatives and liberals all the time. My experience has been that the closer to the poles legislators move, the more they tend to agree on populist issues. This applies not just to privacy issues, but to market competition.

Traditional Chamber of Commerce, country club Republicans are far less prevalent in their party. Now, many Republicans who are anti-big government are also anti-big anything. This includes being anti-big data. Right wing populism is real. A Pew study showed that “…in contrast to other parts of the GOP coalition, [populist Republicans’] criticism extends well beyond government to views of big business and to the economic system as a whole: 82% say that large corporations are having a negative impact on the way things are going in the country, and nearly half support higher taxes on the wealthy and on large corporations.”

An example of this is in Congress where two committee chairs, who agree very little, both supported a national privacy law. U.S. Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA) chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee and U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA) chairs the Senate Commerce Committee. Rodgers and Cantwell both supported American Privacy Rights Act (APRA) in 2024. Yet, even with bipartisan, bicameral support, the APRA also had bipartisan opposition, including the ACLU and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

I have seen this in state legislatures as well. Many Republican legislators support legislation to impose more restrictions on data sharing and data brokers, even if those restrictions work against consumers. These are areas where the left and the right align.

Politics indeed makes strange bedfellows.