FTC’s Launch of Healthcare Task Force: Expanded Enforcement and Policy Advocacy

Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chairman Andrew Ferguson announced the launch of a Healthcare Task Force on March 20, 2026, signaling a significant escalation in the FTC’s approach to healthcare oversight. The directive aligns with President Trump’s February 25, 2025 Executive Order, Making America Healthy Again by Empowering Patients with Clear, Accurate, and Actionable Healthcare Pricing Information (Executive Order), and reflects FTC’s intent to institutionalize and broaden healthcare enforcement while shaping policy moving forward. 

What Is the Healthcare Task Force, and What Will It Do? 

The Healthcare Task Force will bring together FTC’s Bureaus of Competition, Consumer Protection, and Economics, along with the agency’s Office of Policy Planning and Office of Technology. FTC divisions that often historically operated on separate tracks will coordinate to share knowledge, resources, third-party sources, market intelligence, case leads, and relationships with other agencies and stakeholders. 

The Healthcare Task Force will:

1. identify and lead targeted enforcement and advocacy initiatives,

2. devise investigation strategies, 

3. seek opportunities to submit amicus briefs and statements of interest, and 

4. conduct “horizon-scanning exercises” to identify emerging and new priority areas for enforcement and advocacy.

Why Did the FTC’s Chairman Direct the Creation of a Healthcare Task Force?

Chairman Ferguson explained that healthcare became an FTC priority largely due to President Trump’s Executive Order calling for a more competitive, innovative, affordable, and high-quality healthcare system. A key premise of the Executive Order is that transparent healthcare information will restore competition and empower patients. The Executive Order directs the federal government to take all necessary steps to improve price transparency requirements, increase enforcement of those requirements, and identify opportunities to further empower patients with meaningful price information. 

Chairman Ferguson took up this mantle and broadened it. In his directive, he stated that consolidation and anticompetitive conduct in the healthcare marketplace have been drivers of higher healthcare prices, lower quality, decreased access and transparency, and stifled innovation. 

Healthcare, he noted, accounts for roughly 18% of the U.S. gross domestic product, or nearly one dollar out of every five spent in the American economy. Yet, “too many Americans struggle to get the care they need at prices they can afford.” Chairman Ferguson views this dichotomy as the byproduct of the distorted economic landscape in many healthcare markets. 

How Will the Task Force Help Solve The Problem?

The Task Force is explicitly designed to combine antitrust and consumer‑protection enforcement under a single, coordinated initiative and expand to agency and law enforcement partners beyond FTC to deepen expertise and increase reach. Where the FTC previously pursued healthcare consumer protection and competition matters through separate channels, the Task Force will coordinate those efforts across the healthcare industry, identify new and emerging priority enforcement areas, and play an active role in shaping healthcare competition policy moving forward.

Takeaways: 

The Task Force signals that FTC is transitioning away from ad hoc healthcare enforcement and moving towards an institutionalized approach. 

Chairman Ferguson’s memorandum highlights recent competition and consumer‑protection wins and then directs the Task Force, which will be permanent, to coordinate those tracks going forward, suggesting that the FTC intends to move away from episodic enforcement towards an institutionalized, coordinated, and forward‑looking approach.

Enforcement will expand and the stakes will be higher.

The memo strongly signals expanded enforcement. The Task Force is charged with identifying new emerging and priority areas for healthcare enforcement. (We covered examples of those emerging priorities here.) 

The memo also mandates  efforts to expand Task Force membership to other law enforcement partners, including the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Department of Justice (DOJ), which will bring subject‑matter expertise, access to data, regulatory insights, and enforcement levers that the FTC does not have on its own. Partnering with DOJ means that matters may escalate beyond civil FTC enforcement authority. Targets of FTC investigations may face parallel civil and/or criminal scrutiny from the federal DOJ (and state Attorneys General). 

Taken together, this coordination suggests increased breadth and depth of scrutiny and the potential for more severe outcomes. 

FTC will expand its role in shaping healthcare policy

Finally, the memo suggests that FTC will play a larger role in shaping healthcare policy related to unidentified but “key” priorities. The Task Force will seek opportunities to influence courts and regulators through amicus briefs and statements of interest. The inclusion of the Office of Policy Planning, which develops long-range competition and consumer protection policy initiatives, reinforces this point. Finally, by aligning the Task Force with the Executive Order, the FTC positions itself as a central implementer of national healthcare competition policy.

Looking Forward

Through the Healthcare Task Force, FTC connects pricing, transparency, quality, access, and innovation under FTC’s dual competition and consumer protection mandates, with plans to expand interagency membership to increase enforcement leverage. Organizations should assume broader scrutiny, potentially expedited investigation timelines (given the pooling of FTC resources and potential participation from HHS and DOJ), and higher stakes. Theories of harm may emphasize the impact of  pricing, access, and innovation on quality of care. 

We will monitor FTC’s policy interventions in litigation for signals regarding its efforts to shape policy and areas it considers priorities for enforcement and advocacy. 

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