The Justice Department launched an anticompetitive regulations task force March 27 with the goal of identifying and eliminating federal and state regulations surrounding market competition, including in healthcare.
Here are five notes on the initiative:
1. The initiative will operate within the department’s antitrust division and expand ongoing efforts to combat policies that the administration believes are limiting business expansion, increasing consumer costs and reducing innovation.
2. The move reflects a broader deregulatory push by the Trump administration, anchored in recent executive orders focused on rolling back rules that impose significant restrictions on businesses, particularly small enterprises.
3. “Realizing President Trump’s economic Golden Age will require unwinding burdensome regulations that stifle free market competition. This antitrust division will stand against harmful barriers to competition whether imposed by public regulators or private monopolists,” Abigail Slater, assistant attorney general of the department’s antitrust division, said in a March 27 news release. “We look forward to working with the public and with other federal agencies to identify and eliminate anticompetitive laws and regulations.”
4. Healthcare is among the key sectors identified by the department as particularly affected by regulatory burdens. The agency highlighted that certain laws and regulations may discourage hospitals, physicians and other providers from offering low-cost, high-quality care, instead incentivizing consolidation or practices that raise costs and reduce patient access.
5. The department argues that many of these laws — including certificate-of-need laws, reimbursement rules and other structural policies that can restrict market entry and service expansion — now serve primarily to protect incumbents and suppress competition. The department said it is seeking public comment through May 26 on specific laws and regulations that create the greatest barriers to competition in healthcare and other industries.
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