Adviser Tim Wu, who helped to shape President Joe Biden’s antitrust agenda, will leave his position Jan. 4, the White House said Friday.
(Bloomberg) — Adviser Tim Wu, who helped to shape President Joe Biden’s antitrust agenda, will leave his position Jan. 4, the White House said Friday.
Wu will return to teaching antitrust law at Columbia Law School after serving as special assistant to the president for technology and competition policy since March of 2021.
“We had the rare opportunity in this Administration to try and steer the giant battleship of antitrust policy in a new direction,” Wu said in a statement. “We got more done over the last two years than I would have ever imagined, and it has been the opportunity of a lifetime to work on that project with an extraordinarily talented group of colleagues in the White House and the federal agencies.”
Wu’s portfolio will be split into two: Elizabeth Kelly, who currently leads the National Economic Council’s digital assets work, will handle technology policy. Hannah Garden-Monheit, who has worked on the NEC’s pro-competition work alongside Wu, will take over competition policy.
The White House said there will be additions to the team in the coming months.
“In the last two years, the federal government has moved to not only reverse decades of erosion in antitrust enforcement, but to reignite a great American tradition of presidential leadership on competition policy, harkening to the era of Franklin and Teddy Roosevelt,” NEC Director Brian Deese said. “Over the next two years, we will continue to institutionalize bipartisan, pro-competition reforms across agencies to lock in this progress for decades to come.”
Wu was the key architect behind Biden’s executive order last year aimed at boosting competition. That measure included 72 initiatives by more than a dozen federal agencies. The order focused on improving competition within the technology, health care and agriculture industries.
In his role at the NEC, Wu helped lead the Biden administration’s crackdown on corporate power, particularly the largest technology companies.
Wu, who coined the term “net neutrality” — the principle that Internet service providers must treat all communications equally — has spent his career in academia and government arguing that major corporations have a stranglehold over the economy that is hurting smaller companies and consumers.
(Updates with Wu statement in third paragraph)
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