Highlights:
Under the leadership of Lina Khan, the Biden Federal Trade Commission (FTC) racked up a record of major failures. She lost high-profile efforts to block acquisitions by Microsoft and Meta. Her effort to block the Spirit-Frontier airline merger ended not in victory, but in Spirit filing for bankruptcy. The House Oversight Committee concluded that Khan had “abused her authority at the agency, trampling on the due process rights of regulated parties, upending the rule of law, and violating ethics standards.”
While Khan is gone, her anti-free market influence lives on across DC think tanks, Congressional offices, etc. Exhibit A is Katherine Van Dyck.
Van Dyck built her pre-government career as a senior figure at the American Economic Liberties Project (AELP) – an organization that Pinpoint previously spotlighted as a hub for the “movement to combat monopolistic corporations,” funded by deep-pocketed liberal foundations, including more than $9 million from investor and megadonor George Soros and a range of liberal foundations.
AELP’s research director was named “Washington’s angriest progressive” by Politico. Its former executive director, Sarah Miller, served as Chief of Staff to Lina Khan and held senior roles for Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama. Miller’s husband, Faiz Shakir, ran Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign. This is not a nonpartisan organization.
From AELP, Van Dyck took her activism directly into government, joining the FTC under Khan, citing motivation by Khan’s antitrust lawsuit against Amazon. She praised Khan for “restoring the FTC’s mission,” built and ran the agency’s amicus program on Khan’s behalf, and celebrated Khan’s “transformative leadership” on her way out.
Since leaving government, Van Dyck has pushed her anti-market agenda through her role as Senior Legal Fellow back at AELP, her consulting firm KVD Strategies, UC Berkeley’s Civil Justice Research Initiative, and a steady stream of op-eds and congressional testimony. For Van Dyck, the common thread is that markets are broken, corporations are predators, and the solution is always more government.
In a 2024 law review article, she called to revive the 1936 Depression-era Robinson-Patman act to punish Walmart and other large retailers. She has argued that widely-available commercial software used by hotels to set pricing is illegal under the Sherman Act. And she co-authored a model “Junk Fee Prevention Act” that would widely expand the powers of government regulators.
Van Dyck’s policy positions reflect the worldview shared by the far-left political network she has cultivated. Since 2017, she has contributed at least $5,086 to federal Democratic campaigns, including President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, Senators Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker, and Beto O’Rourke.
Further, she’s championed squad member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as someone who will “fight against corporate interests,” cheered the arrival of Warren/Biden advisor Bharat Ramamurti at AELP, and congratulated an FTC alum for joining the administration of Democratic Socialist NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani, calling him a “big catch for consumers.” In April 2025, she declared that America is “officially in an autocracy.”
Katherine Van Dyck is not a mainstream advocate for consumers’ interests, but instead a disciple of the anti-capitalist left, trained at a Soros-funded think tank, operated in the halls of government under Linda Khan’s FTC, and now advancing the same agenda from the outside. Her policy prescription of growing the regulator state – resurrecting Depression-era statutes, criminalizing software, and banning fees – is an anathema to those who believe in the role that strong healthy markets play in driving American prosperity.
Lina Khan’s FTC is gone, but as exemplified by Katherine Van Dyck, the movement she built is still very much at work.
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