Reinstate the FTC's 2015 Policy Statement on unfair methods of competition

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Printed page 872 30. Federal Trade Commission

“Second, the FTC’s recent rescinding of its 2015 Policy Statement was undoubtedly ill-considered.”

What has happened

Sep 1, 2026 Not started

The 2015 Statement of Enforcement Principles Regarding Unfair Methods of Competition was withdrawn in July 2021 and replaced by the Commission's November 2022 Policy Statement Regarding the Scope of Unfair Methods of Competition. Neither was disturbed in the window: the FTC's policy-statement library still carries the 2022 statement and nothing readopting the 2015 principles, and the Commission issued no Section 5 policy statement of any kind between 2025-01-20 and 2026-09-01. The four policy statements it did issue are on labor activity, age verification, AI accuracy, personalized pricing and disparate impact.

No action found yet. This entry is the starting point, not a finding.

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Negative search: the FTC’s own policy-statement index (https://www.ftc.gov/legal-library/browse/policy-statements, read 2026-09-01, 50 per page) lists every statement by date; the in-window entries are 2026-08-19 (personalized pricing, proposed), 2026-08-07 (disparate impact), 2026-07-01 (AI accuracy, proposed), 2026-02-25 (age verification) and three January 2025 items adopted before the inauguration. The 2022-11-10 Section 5 statement is still listed and the 2021-07-09 withdrawal statement is still the last word on the 2015 principles.
ftc.gov press-release search for "Section 5", 2015 policy statement and efficiencies returns nothing in the window (the search box is real — a nonsense term returns a different, empty result set).
Chairman Ferguson’s one published statement of enforcement framework in the window is the 2025-02-18 memo keeping the 2023 Merger Guidelines in place, which says the opposite of what this ask wants for guidance documents generally: “we should prize stability and disfavor wholesale rescission”. That memo is Evidence on #2235 and #2236, not here — it is about merger review, not Section 5 standalone conduct.