With two key staffing picks, President-elect Donald Trump is giving some early hints as to how his second administration will try to forge a new Republican consensus on tech. Trump announced yesterday that he’s picked FTC Commissioner Andrew Ferguson as the new chair of that agency, and U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commissioner (and Palantir senior adviser) Jacob Helberg as undersecretary of state for economic growth, energy and the environment. The two men will be responsible, in part, for enacting a sea change from the Biden administration in how government relates to tech — and turning the diverse, heterodoxical beliefs and ambitions of the new tech right into something resembling a coherent national policy. “I don’t know if it’s cringe to quote ‘Hamilton,’ but there’s a line that comes to mind where he says ‘winning is easy, but governing is hard,’” Adam Kovacevich, founder and CEO of the pro-tech Chamber of Progress, told DFD by way of describing their conundrum. Ferguson and Helberg will have different policy ambits, but face similar challenges in establishing what Trump described in his announcements for each as his “America First” policy agenda. For Ferguson that means rolling back current FTC Chair Lina Khan’s antitrust agenda, widely loathed by the venture capitalists who powered Trump’s victory, while maintaining the Republican Party’s burgeoning anti-Big Tech populism. For Helberg, that means changing the global conversation on issues like energy and artificial intelligence, while maintaining a hawkish stance on China — something that might prove tricky given Helberg’s role in gathering support for the de facto TikTok ban, about which Trump has expressed ambivalence. Ferguson finds himself charged with navigating a way out of the Trumpian Republican Party’s identity crisis, as traditional pro-business voices find themselves at odds with populists who want the GOP to take a harder line against corporations seen as steamrolling conservative interests. Vice President-elect JD Vance has praised the current Chair Khan, and fellow anti-Big Tech populist Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) held up Ferguson’s nomination to the FTC over concerns he could be too conciliatory to business. In his pitch for the position, first reported by Punchbowl News’ Ben Brody, Ferguson offered four key planks of his agenda as chair: to “reverse Lina Khan’s anti-business agenda,” “hold big tech accountable and stop censorship,” “protect freedom of speech and fight wokeness,” and “fight the bureaucracy to implement President Trump’s agenda.” Some observers on the right see those pointing toward a new consensus within the GOP, where concerns about businesses’ freedom to operate as they please take a back seat to those about their perceived overweening influence on American public life. “It's an answer to the concerns you see from regular Americans and voters about whether they’re being left behind, and whether Big Tech is going about things in a way that undermines their free expression or free speech,” Nathan Leamer, a former Republican Federal Communications Commission adviser and chief executive of consulting group Fixed Gear Strategies, told DFD. “If you were a Republican in 2012, you would just say, ‘yeah, censorship happens and you should be fine with that,’ and now we’re saying, wait, maybe there are ways that we could go after this and have a better outcome,” he said. Ferguson’s pitch also included a friendlier approach to mergers and acquisitions, something that’s been a key criticism of Khan’s FTC from tech investors. Helberg, Trump’s undersecretary of state pick, has close ties to that world as a senior adviser to Palantir’s CEO, Alex Karp. In his post on X accepting the nomination Helberg cited Trump and Vance’s “aggressive agenda to face the twin convulsions of technological and geopolitical change,” and the tech right is optimistic that he’ll use his post to further integrate America’s race for tech and geopolitical supremacy against China. “It speaks to the kind of holistic approach you're seeing at the State Department, recognizing that the future of our economy needs to be concerned with the threats that we face, whether it's from China or other foreign actors,” Leamer said. But … what about TikTok? Helberg was a chief instigator of the de facto ban on the app, which is now all but counting on Trump to save it. Although the company has sworn to keep fighting its forced sale to a non-Chinese-owned company, a federal appeals court last week upheld the constitutionality of the law passed earlier this year that would ban it if that sale does not occur by January 19, 2025. The TikTok issue is a tricky one for Trump: Although the hawkish tech right knows all too well the national security risks of a foreign-owned, unaccountable tech platform harvesting reams of data on Americans and programming their social media feeds, Trump simply … does not like doing things that are unpopular, which a TikTok ban largely would be. Leamer expressed optimism that Helberg’s know-how on tech and China combined with Trump’s instinct for deal-making would force a resolution, by way of sale to a non-Chinese company: “Bringing in people like Helberg could be incredibly helpful to solve the conundrum about who owns TikTok in the future,” he said. “What does a deal look like? Honestly, if Trump is in office with China in this situation, maybe they do feel like they have to make one.” On other issues like AI and energy, Helberg is expected to bring a business-friendly, anything-goes approach to global negotiations akin to that envisioned by venture capitalist Marc Andreessen in a conversation yesterday with the Free Press’ Bari Weiss. That’s in keeping with the overall deregulatory platform the tech world has clamored for — with key carveouts for areas like battling “misinformation” and policing AI speech and development in the name of “safety,” which they see as infringing on Americans’ rights even when private corporations do it. As figures like Ferguson and Helberg attempt to work out the kinks in that emerging consensus, those close to industry like the Chamber of Progress’ Kovacevich are left to argue that the very principles of freedom they claim to preserve provide plenty of room for every kind of tech platform. “The social media world can accommodate both. It can accommodate Truth Social, it can accommodate Twitter and it can accommodate Instagram,” Kovacevich said. “Each of those services has varying approaches to content moderation and content policies, but that's part of the whole value proposition.” | 
