Project 2025 Tracker / What’s done, what’s next

30. Federal Trade Commission · Minor

Return authority to the FTC's regional offices

Not started

876 30. Federal Trade Commission

“FTC regional offices are substantially more in touch with local issues. Over the past few decades, the reach and influence of regional offices has shrunk dramatically. The FTC should consider returning authority to these offices.”

What has happened

  1. Not started

    Nothing in the window changes what the regional offices may do. The FTC still runs eight regional offices across seven regions and they still appear as the lead office on cases — the Sendit action of 2025-09-29 is a Western Region Los Angeles matter — but no delegation of authority, reorganization or announcement returning authority to them was found, and the Commission's twelve senior appointments in the window are all headquarters posts. **Both documents the read-queue row asked for were opened on 2026-09-06 and neither records a change.** The Commission's organization chart, stamped "Last Updated 9/3/2026", names every office and bureau and its head and then collapses the entire field structure into one unnamed box labeled "Regions" - the regional offices have no separate reporting line, no named leadership and no delegated function on the Commission's own chart. The FY 2027 Congressional Budget Justification is no more forthcoming: it says only that "FTC headquarters is located in Washington, DC, and eight regional offices are located around the country", and its budget tables are by Goal rather than by office, so there is **no regional staffing line to compare at all**. Agency-wide full-time equivalents fall from 1,224 in FY 2025 to 1,183 requested for FY 2027. The regional-offices page, re-read the same day, still describes the eight offices in the pre-window terms - investigations and litigation, local outreach, and partnerships with local, state, regional and cross-border law enforcement.

Research log

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

Research notes

  • Negative search: ftc.gov/about-ftc/bureaus-offices/regional-offices (read 2026-09-01: eight offices, seven regions, described as conducting investigations and litigation and building partnerships with state and local law enforcement — the same description as before the window); ftc.gov press-release searches for regional, reorganization and appoints across the window, which return case releases tagged to a region and no structural change. The Federal Register carries no FTC organization or delegation notice in the window.
  • A delegation of authority inside an agency often leaves no public instrument at all, which is the “unverifiable by construction” shape flagged in .scratch/lower-tiers/plan.md; the negative search is recorded so the not started is distinguishable from an unresearched placeholder.
  • What the read-queue row hoped for and what it found (2026-09-06). The row asked whether “regional-office staffing or authority changed”. The answer is that the Commission does not publish regional-office staffing: the FY 2027 Congressional Budget Justification allocates FTE by strategic Goal, not by office or region, and the only sentence about the regions in its 1,026 lines is a statement that eight of them exist. The organization chart is equally uninformative by design — one box, no head, no line. So the negative is now precise about why it cannot be falsified from the published record, which is better than a bare “nothing found”.
  • Route: ftc.gov opens on the browser-User-Agent rung. ftc.gov/about-ftc/budget-performance and ftc.gov/policy/reports/annual-reports are 404s; the live index is ftc.gov/about-ftc/budget-strategy/budget-performance-financial-reporting, which links the FY 2025, FY 2026 and FY 2027 justifications and the FY 2027 performance report.
Action
restore
Object
FTC regional offices
ID
2247