What Is an Independent Agency to Do? The Trump Administration’s Executive Order on Preventing Online Censorship and the Federal Trade Commission

President Trump’s Executive Order on Preventing Online Censorship is the latest in a series of proposals aimed at independent agencies, chiefly the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and Federal Trade Commission (FTC), that seek to police how tech companies operate their social media platforms. These measures suffer from fatal defects. They run against the weight of First Amendment law and, our focus, beyond the limits of FTC Section 5 authority. We briefly summarize the scope of that authority before analyzing the Executive Order against the backdrop of the First Amendment and Section 5; concluding it would be illegal and imprudent to enforce. We conclude with suggestions for how the FTC should handle the position it finds itself in—facing an Executive Order to consider and study unlawful enforcement actions that not only undermine its independence, but also shift its attention away from its primary mission of consumer protection toward policing free speech