Ramirez Will Likely Spend First Few Months As Chairman Without Majority, Working on Agency Maintenance

There will likely be continuity “in her program and the program Jon Leibowitz built,” said Bill Kovacic, former FTC chairman and current director of George Washington University’s Competition Law Center. “Her voting, her work at the agency consistently supported” Leibowitz’s, he said. One difference between Leibowitz and Ramirez is that Leibowitz came to the agency after working on Capitol Hill, Kovacic continued. As the head of the agency, Ramirez “might be less immediately involved with” Congress because of her background.

It’s likely Ramirez will spend her first few months on administrative efforts, Kovacic said. Vladeck recently left the agency, and it’s possible that Competition Bureau Director Richard Feinstein and Economics Bureau Director Howard Shelanski may be departing in the coming months, Kovacic said. “It is possible that in a period of six months that she will have to appoint a new senior staff across the board.” The FTC had no comment on whether Feinstein or Shelanski plans to leave. Additionally, Ramirez will lead the agency as it moves all personnel -- besides those at its Pennsylvania Avenue headquarters -- to a new facility at L'Enfant Plaza and deals with sequestration-level resources, Kovacic said. “Who knows what their budget will look like. … She has her hands full with just the routine management of the agency."

Ramirez “may spend the first half year without a reliable majority” because of the politics of the other three commissioners, Kovacic said. Having a commission composed of two Democrats -- Ramirez and Commissioner Julie Brill -- and two Republicans -- commissioners Joshua Wright and Maureen Ohlhausen -- “limits what you can do,” Kovacic said. Because of the split commission, “there could be stalemate on an awful lot of issues,” said Robert Lande, senior fellow at the American Antitrust Institute. “This will test her diplomatic skills,” he said; her ability to get the necessary commission votes “depends on her precise relationship with the two Republican commissioners” and how well she can find issues, like privacy, “that will appeal to the two Republicans.” As the newest addition to the commission, Wright is an “untested commodity,” Lande said. “She'll have to figure out how to work with him."

Privacy will likely continue to be a focus for the agency under Ramirez, said Howard Beales, former Consumer Protection Bureau director. The FTC doesn’t “really have anything to give them legal authority” in the realm of Do Not Track, but members of the commission have said they would support legislation if the multistakeholder process does not produce an effective DNT option, Beales said: “I would anticipate that’s where Ramirez and Brill would be."

The agency “will get a whole lot of data back” from the inquiries it sent to data brokers last year, Vladeck said. While the FTC can’t use any of that data for investigations, it can go back and request the data again if something warrants an investigation, he said. “Their scope is broad, and they ask for a lot of data,” so they should give the agency a lot of information about the data broker industry. Beales said the FTC “could try to give [the data broker industry] more clarity” under Ramirez’s leadership.

Fighting scams aimed at lower-income consumers is “going to remain a high priority” for the agency under Ramirez, Vladeck said. “Last dollar frauds,” or deceptive businesses practices that are aimed at low-income consumers, have been a priority for the commission for years, and as a commissioner, “Chairman Ramirez was extremely supportive of those efforts,” he said. The efforts of the agency will be tied to the overall health of the economy, which affects how prevalent these scams are, he said. “If the economy improves, we'll see less of that."

The FTC should do more to protect disadvantaged consumers, said Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy. “I would hope that under Ramirez we would see a major review of how Hispanic, African-America and Asian-America communities are being treated by the new digital marketplace,” he said. Though “the FTC is aware that there’s a growing problem in the financial marketplace with new products and services that may treat consumers unfairly,” the agency has “largely ignored the concerns of poor people and communities of color,” he said: As chairman, Ramirez could create a legacy “by championing the issues of the underserved and overlooked.”

Chester credited the FTC for making “strong inroads on consumer protection” and “engaging head on with key privacy issues” under Leibowitz and Vladeck. “We're going to continue to see advances made on the privacy front” under Ramirez, he said.