The Fees That Fund the FTC's Merger Police Are Shrinking. Its Antitrust Staff Already Did.

Every company that wants to buy another one above a certain size has to pay the federal government first.▸ That payment — a Hart-Scott-Rodino premerger filing fee, ranging from $35,000 to $2.46 million per deal — is not a minor line item in the Federal Trade Commission's budget. It is most of it. The mechanism is simple: dealmakers fund the agency that scrutinizes deals. Two numbers, both from the FTC's own recent budget filings, show what happens when that mechanism comes under strain from both directions at once — the fee revenue funding it is falling, and the antitrust staff spending it had already been cut.

The FTC's Fiscal Year 2027 Congressional Budget Justification requests $426.71 million and 1,183 full-time positions — enough to restore the agency to its FY2025 enacted level, after Congress funded it at just $383.6 million for FY2026.▸ Of that FY2027 request, the document assumes $286.328 million will come from Hart-Scott-Rodino filing fees and $18 million from Do Not Call Registry fees, together covering 71% of the budget — "thereby reducing FTC reliance on the general fund appropriation," in the filing's own words. But the HSR share is shrinking: the same document's FY2025 baseline shows $310.593 million collected that year, a $24.265 million drop headed into FY2027. To close the gap, the FTC's request assumes the general-fund appropriation — money from ordinary taxpayers, not merging companies — rises $25.275 million, from $97.107 million to $122.382 million. The mechanism still runs mostly on merger fees; it is running less on them than it used to, and more on the Treasury.

A year before that request, the FTC's own Fiscal Year 2026 Congressional Budget Justification proposed cutting the Bureau of Competition — the antitrust arm, budgeted under "Promoting Competition" — from 600 full-time positions to 549, a loss of 51 positions and $23.51 million, part of an agency-wide reduction from 1,183 to 1,100 FTE and $42.1 million.▸ Chairman Andrew Ferguson's own justification called it "a 15% reduction from its January 20 onboard staffing level." Independent reporting on the ground matched the direction if not the exact baseline: Kelley Drye's advertising-law practice group tracked the agency's headcount falling from 1,221 employees to approximately 1,100 by May 2025 — "the lowest level in a decade" — following 94 earlier departures and a round of dismissals and buyout offers that hit the Bureau of Competition alongside consumer-protection and technology staff, per Nextgov/FCW's March 2025 reporting. The FY2027 request would put the antitrust bureau back at 600 — an acknowledgment, in budget-document form, that the FY2026 cut went further than the agency now wants.

The staffing and funding questions matter because the workload didn't shrink to match.▸ The FTC and the Justice Department's Antitrust Division jointly released the Hart-Scott-Rodino Annual Report for Fiscal Year 2025 — their 48th, covering October 2024 through September 2025 — this month. Companies notified the agencies of 2,006 transactions, with an aggregate value of $2.5 trillion; 31.8% were worth more than $1 billion. Of the 1,944 transactions the report's statistical tables treat as the baseline, the agencies together issued 41 Second Requests — the formal demand for more documents that signals a deal is getting real scrutiny — and took merger enforcement action against 18: eight by the FTC (three litigated, three resolved by consent order, two abandoned under investigative pressure) and ten by the Antitrust Division (two litigated, two resolved by consent decree, two abandoned, four restructured). Fewer than one in a hundred filed transactions ended in a formal enforcement action, in a year when the two agencies had fewer people on the antitrust side than the year before to do that reviewing.

Fiscal-year figures come from three separate FTC/DOJ documents — the FY2026 and FY2027 Congressional Budget Justifications and the FY2025 Hart-Scott-Rodino Annual Report — each cited to its own page range; the FY2026 bureau-level staffing figures are the agency's budget request, not a separately confirmed enacted-by-bureau breakdown, even though Congress funded the FTC's FY2026 total at the exact dollar level requested.