Gail Slater, the head of the Department of Justice's antitrust division, announced Thursday that she is stepping down — ending a tenure marked by high-profile Big Tech cases and, more recently, escalating internal friction with DOJ leadership.
Slater broke the news herself, posting on X:
"It is with great sadness and abiding hope that I leave my role as AAG for Antitrust today. It was indeed the honor of a lifetime to serve in this role. Huge thanks to all who supported me this past year, most especially the men and women of [the antitrust division]."
The gracious tone belies what appears to have been a turbulent final stretch. In recent weeks, new tensions have reportedly surfaced between Slater and DOJ leadership, including a dispute in which Attorney General Pam Bondi reportedly overrode Slater's attempt to remove her chief of staff, according to Semafor.
That episode didn't happen in a vacuum.
Slater's departure caps a rough stretch for the antitrust division's leadership ranks. As reported by The Hill, two of her deputies were fired last year, including Roger Alford, whose ouster followed an internal dispute over the handling of a merger between Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Juniper Networks.
Alford didn't leave quietly. After being fired, he publicly criticized DOJ leadership outside the antitrust division, alleging that politically connected lobbyists were being allowed to influence decision-making. No corroborating details have been made public, but the accusation alone signaled deep dysfunction — the kind that doesn't stay contained for long.
When your deputies are getting fired and then lobbing grenades on the way out, the internal picture isn't hard to read. And when the Attorney General personally blocks a division chief from choosing her own staff, the chain-of-command message is unmistakable.
Slater wasn't running a backwater office. She was overseeing major antitrust cases against Google and Apple — the most consequential competition enforcement actions against Big Tech in a generation. These cases carry enormous implications for how the federal government polices monopoly power in the digital economy, and they now move forward without the person who was steering them.
The antitrust fight against Big Tech has never been a traditional left-right issue. It cuts across familiar lines. There's a legitimate conservative case — one championed by figures close to Vice President Vance, whom Slater previously advised — that massive tech platforms have accrued the kind of unchecked power that distorts markets, suppresses competition, and enables ideological gatekeeping. Breaking up or constraining that power isn't big-government overreach. It's defending the competitive marketplace that free enterprise depends on.
That's what made Slater's appointment significant in the first place. She wasn't a holdover progressive antitrust crusader repackaged for a new administration. She was a Vance ally, someone philosophically aligned with the new conservative skepticism toward concentrated corporate power. Her presence signaled that the antitrust cases against Big Tech were not going to quietly evaporate.
Her exit raises an unavoidable question: Does the departure change the trajectory of those cases?
Personnel is policy. It's one of the oldest truisms in Washington because it's one of the most consistently true. Who runs the antitrust division matters enormously, not just for legal strategy, but for institutional will. These cases against Google and Apple are massive, well-lawyered fights against companies with virtually unlimited resources to delay, litigate, and lobby. Prosecuting them requires sustained commitment at the top.
The specific reasons behind Slater's departure remain somewhat opaque. Her statement offers warmth but no explanation. The reported clashes with DOJ leadership — the overruled staffing decision, the fired deputies, Alford's public allegations about lobbyist influence — paint a picture of an office under pressure from multiple directions. But no one has drawn a direct causal line from those tensions to Thursday's announcement.
What's clear is that the antitrust division needs steady, aggressive leadership to carry these cases to their conclusion. The worst possible outcome for anyone who believes Big Tech's dominance is a problem would be a leadership vacuum that lets these cases drift into settlement purgatory or bureaucratic neglect.
Slater's successor will inherit both the cases and the internal dynamics that apparently made the job untenable. That's not just a legal challenge. It's a test of whether this administration's stated commitment to reining in Big Tech survives the messy reality of governing.
The division's career attorneys will keep working. The cases won't disappear overnight. But momentum in antitrust enforcement is fragile, and the companies on the other side of these lawsuits know exactly how to exploit a transition.
The next appointment will tell us everything.