Americans For Prosperity Foundation Files Comment in Support of X Corp.’s Petition to End Administrative Overreach and Protect Free Speech
By
| July 1, 2026
On June 29th, Americans for Prosperity Foundation filed a comment in support of X Corp.’s Petition to end or modify a 20-year Federal Trade Commission administrative monitoring order the company (then Twitter) entered into in 2022 shortly before a change in ownership. AFPF believes that protection of the freedoms of expression and association, guaranteed by the First Amendment, is essential for a free society, and that coercive government force should never be used to suppress speech regardless of whether one agrees with the viewpoints expressed by the speaker. And AFPF strongly supports the principles of constitutionally limited government, including the separation of powers and principles of due process required by the Constitution. AFPF’s comment argues that the FTC’s administrative monitoring order stands in tension with those principles and should be revisited.
The FTC is a federal law enforcement agency with vast investigative and prosecutorial powers, also empowered to bring enforcement actions in its own in-house tribunal where it acts as prosecutor and judge of its own cause. For a variety of reasons including to avoid costly, protracted legal battles, targets of FTC administrative investigations often choose to settle with the FTC by entering into administrative consent orders. The duration and terms of these FTC orders are typically harsh, imposing decades of time-consuming and expensive compliance, recordkeeping, reporting and monitoring requirements that ordinary people would balk at, such as provisions requiring them to pay for third-party auditors to root around in their records and produce vast volumes of sensitive documents and information to the FTC on demand.
As AFPF’s comment explains, the FTC’s 20-year administrative consent “orders frequently include provisions that chill innovation; lock in outdated technologies; [and] impose invasive, burdensome, and expensive third-party assessments and other monitoring and certification requirements[.]” These orders are difficult to satisfy and often grossly disproportionate—or unrelated—to the alleged conduct, which in cases involving technology may involve little or no concrete harm to identifiable consumers. Further still, the FTC often demands the inclusion of harsh boilerplate provisions going far beyond the relief the agency could likely obtain in litigation, such as the “compliance monitoring” provisions in the 2022 Order that is the subject of X Corp.’s Petition, which grant the FTC sweeping investigative and enforcement authority, including unbridled subpoena-like powers.
As AFPF’s comment explains, there is also a risk that those powers may be abused by the government in a wayward effort to coerce social media companies like X Corp. into suppressing speech protected by the First Amendment. Indeed, an investigation conducted by the U.S. House of Representatives Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government found evidence suggesting that this is exactly what the FTC under then-Chair Lina Khan sought to do to X Corp., issuing hundreds of burdensome and invasive demands for documents and information in just the first three months after ownership changed. Those requests went far afield from the subject of the administrative order, targeting the company’s communications with named journalists and all communications “relating to” Mr. Elon Musk.
AFPF’s comment urges the Commission under Chairman Andrew Ferguson to reverse course, take X Corp.’s Petition as an opportunity to broadly reevaluate the terms and duration of its administrative orders, and reaffirm the importance of the government respecting the First Amendment and marketplace of ideas:
As we approach America’s semiquincentennial, it bears reminding that one of the cited grievances in the Declaration of Independence was that the Crown sent “hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance[.]”That well describes how the 2022 Order appears to have been weaponized by the Chair Khan FTC to target and attack X Corp. On the cusp of America’s 250th birthday, it is time to give X Corp. its independence from FTC. X Corp.’s Petition should be granted.
AFPF’s full comment is available here.
