Rohit Chopra’s unconventional methods for making change happen in a sclerotic government By David Dayen
Last June, when Lina Khan was unexpectedly named the chair of the Federal Trade Commission, an FTC staffer named Jen Howard posted a picture on Twitter with the caption “#squad.” The picture (see page 15) featured Khan in the FTC offices, leaning against a desk alongside her fellow commissioner Rohit Chopra. The knowing smiles invited a recognition of newfound power, a self-awareness that these two young progressives were about to shake up executive boardrooms nationwide. To the small community of experts working on corporate power, it was a viral moment. But the picture was actually taken three years earlier, when Khan came to work for Chopra at the FTC. The quiet confidence shows through despite a position of weakness: Chopra, as one of two Democrats, was outnumbered on the commission by three Republicans handpicked by Donald Trump. Even when Democrats ran the agency, it had been paralyzed since the late 1970s by a selfimposed inertia and reluctance to take on powerful interests. Yet the self-assurance was warranted. 12 PROSPECT.ORG APRIL 2022
By the end of the Trump presidency, the FTC would advance Chopra’s proposal to penalize bogus “Made in USA” labeling, take action on one of his top priorities by filing suit against Facebook for illegal monopolization, and become at least a little relevant again as a willing implementer of the public’s business. That picture of Chopra and Khan now hangs in a hallway at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). Last October, Chopra, who just turned 40, took over as director. But the legacy he left at the FTC is remarkable. Khan, now the chair, worked for Chopra. The director of the Bureau of Competition, Holly Vedova, advised Chopra. The director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection, Samuel Levine, also advised Chopra. And Jen Howard, who was Chopra’s chief of staff, is fulfilling that role for Khan. “He brings in a staff that actually today runs the FTC,” said Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, a nonprofit privacy advocate. “Rohit was exactly the ER doctor the FTC desperately needed.”
To hear it from Chopra’s end, he wasn’t the intellectual godfather of the FTC’s restoration, but a junior partner. “Sam Levine, I knew him from the Illinois attorney general’s office, prosecuting Westwood, a for-profit college chain,” he told me in an interview. “I learned so much from Lina, Sam, Holly Vedova. I brought in people I learned a lot from, I don’t know how much teaching I did.” You will not hear Chopra take anything approaching credit; he constantly defers to his colleagues. But in just over a decade in government, he has been astonishingly effective in finding ways to make even unfavorable positions in Washington work for the public good. In this way, he has swum against a tide of lost faith in institutions that dates back decades. We hear a constant lament from the media, the public, and even policymakers that a system with multiple veto points, unbearable gridlock, the overbearing specter of corporate money, and official cowardice in the face of all that has become essentially unnavigable. Chopra’s career
PHILIP BURKE
Washington’s Best Hope L
