A group of administrative law scholars pushed back against the claims in an amicus brief on Friday, saying the FTC has a clear congressional mandate to promulgate unfair competition rules and said the “major questions doctrine” applies when there’s a “mismatch” between an agency’s action and its assigned mission.
“No such mismatch plausibly exists here: Congress has vested the commission with broad powers over unfair methods of competition, and no government agency could reasonably be expected to have greater expertise than the commission concerning non-compete agreements or unfair methods of competition generally,” the scholars said.
An attorney for the scholars, Mark Samburg, senior counsel for the Democracy Forward Foundation, said in a statement on Monday that the “extremists” behind the rule challenge make a series of arguments that are fundamentally flawed and said the scholar’s brief shows how “outlandish those challenges to this important protection for workers are.”
“Non-compete clauses have kept millions of people trapped in jobs they may not want, and Democracy Forward is committed to defending workers’ hard-fought freedoms,” Samburg said.
