Prices are about to climb again, and the fingerprints belong to the Department of Justice.

Federal antitrust law has existed since the late 1800s because unchecked corporate power gouges consumers. The DOJ's Antitrust Division enforces that law, blocking mergers that crush competition and prosecuting price-fixing schemes that pad corporate margins at everyone else's expense. Under Attorney General Todd Blanche, that enforcement has quietly collapsed, and the collapse has a name attached to it.

Gail Slater ran the Antitrust Division for nearly a year before she resigned in February 2026, under pressure that had been building for months. She had been reviewing Hewlett Packard Enterprise's $14 billion bid to acquire rival Juniper Networks, a deal her staff worried would gut competition in enterprise networking. Mike Davis, a lobbyist working for HPE, allegedly called Slater directly. According to sworn testimony from her former deputy Roger Alford, Davis told her that if she didn't approve the settlement, he would destroy her job at DOJ. Slater reported the call immediately. The department fired two of her deputies soon after. She resigned herself in February.

Davis denies threatening Slater and calls the allegation entirely false. He does not deny recommending her firing "to anyone who would listen," a detail he confirmed in his own deposition. He also does not deny that his client portfolio generates $300,000 a month in fees, a figure the Wall Street Journal confirmed through its own reporting. Davis has described himself as "the best fixer in Washington, period, full stop."

The HPE deal was not an outlier. Compass and Anywhere Real Estate, two of the country's largest residential brokerages, moved to merge in a $1.6 billion transaction that gave the combined company control of more than 80 percent of residential sales by dollar volume in Manhattan alone, according to RealTrends data. Slater wanted an extended review. Davis, representing Compass, took the matter over her head to Todd Blanche, who was then serving as Deputy Attorney General. Blanche agreed the deal didn't need deeper scrutiny. It closed in January 2026, weeks before the department ousted her entirely.

The consequences surfaced within weeks of the merger's close. Compass began charging buyers and sellers nationwide a new fixed transaction fee, several hundred dollars depending on the state, stacked on top of the existing commission. American real estate commissions already run 5 to 6 percent of a home's sale price, roughly double the global average, according to Columbia Business School real estate professor Tomasz Piskorski. The fee appeared the same month the DOJ chose not to pursue a closer review.

Her replacement shows exactly where the department's priorities now sit. Stanley Woodward, the DOJ's third-ranking official, took over leadership of the Antitrust Division in June. Before joining the department, Woodward co-founded a law firm that received roughly $120,000 from Donald Trump's political action committee, Save America, and built a career representing high-profile clients in civil litigation. The Wall Street Journal reported that Woodward told the department's Chicago office he wants to avoid antitrust trials altogether, a stance consistent with his role brokering the HPE-Juniper settlement in the first place. Business groups and antitrust observers alike describe him as business-friendly.

The department still exists on an organizational chart, though a lobbyist's threat and two overruled reviews indicate a different operating reality.

The DOJ sued Live Nation and Ticketmaster in 2024 for monopolizing the concert ticketing industry, alongside a coalition of dozens of states. When the trial opened in March 2026, the DOJ settled mid-trial for a $280 million fund and a handful of behavioral promises, without forcing a divestiture of Ticketmaster. Thirty-three states and the District of Columbia refused to accept that outcome and continued the litigation without the federal government. In April, a jury found Live Nation and Ticketmaster liable on every antitrust count, including illegal monopolization, and calculated that the companies had overcharged fans $1.72 per primary ticket through anticompetitive conduct. The states won what the DOJ walked away from. A federal judge will now decide the remedy the department declined to pursue.

Some mergers under review by this DOJ have faced continued scrutiny, and defenders of the administration's approach argue that lighter enforcement encourages investment and innovation rather than penalizing scale for its own sake. Real estate economists disagree about whether consolidation lowers costs through efficiency or raises them through reduced competition, and that disagreement reflects an active body of research. The department's handling of Slater's departure suggests these decisions did not rest on the merits alone.

Davis threatened Slater over the phone, and department leadership approved the settlement her staff had resisted. Compass raised its fees a month later. Ticketmaster is still selling tickets at prices a jury ruled illegal, because the agency meant to stop that chose not to. None of this requires a new law or a court ruling. It requires an office that takes a lobbyist's call over its own staff's findings, and a Deputy Attorney General who backs that call instead of his own antitrust chief.

@Santitos

@salinasmariasantos

Copyright © 2026 Maria Santos Salinas for FRONTeras.

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