Today, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Senate Antitrust Subcommittee Ranking Member Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), introduced the Merger Filing Fee Modernization Act. The Act would increase merger filing fees for large mergers reviewed by the Department of Justice Antitrust Division and the Federal Trade Commission, and use the additional funding to increase budgets for the two enforcers.
Public Knowledge applauds Sens. Grassley and Klobuchar for their leadership in helping our antitrust enforcement agencies keep up with the increasing number of mergers and costs of the merger review process.
The following can be attributed to Charlotte Slaiman, Competition Policy Counsel at Public Knowledge:
“I want to thank Senator Grassley and Senator Klobuchar for introducing this important bill. The Merger Filing Fee Modernization Act will provide the DOJ’s Antitrust Division and the FTC with additional resources to do the increasingly complex and important work of analyzing mergers — and in some cases, suing to block them.
“While it is much more than a lack of resources that prevents these agencies from successfully addressing fully the problems of concentration in our economy, increasing merger filing fees for large mergers to increase funding for these agencies is an important and common-sense step forward that deserves broad support.”
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