The Biden administration turned the Federal Trade Commission into the Tasmanian Devil of federal agencies, one quick to ravage corporate mergers and bare its fangs to intimidate corporate leaders into abandoning anticompetitive behaviors.

But ahead of the presidential election in November, a prominent antitrust attorney says, perhaps counterintuitively, that a Donald Trump administration wouldn't necessarily yank out all of the FTC's teeth—and that a Kamala Harris administration might even put a leash on it.