Gail Slater, the assistant attorney general for antitrust, once celebrated as a MAGA warrior against Big Tech consolidation, is out at the Department of Justice. She announced her departure on Thursday after being given a stark choice earlier this week: resign or be fired.
Slater posted a brief farewell on X, not explaining the abrupt exit.
"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 @justiceatr"
Gracious words for an ungracious ending. What the post didn't say matters more than what it did.
According to the Daily Caller, Slater was confirmed in March 2025. According to sources, the deterioration in her relationship with Attorney General Pam Bondi and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche began almost immediately afterward.
Three incidents reportedly drove the collapse. Slater took an unauthorized trip to Paris for a conference — prompting Bondi to cut off her government credit cards. She allegedly lied to Bondi about consulting the intelligence community regarding the Hewlett-Packard Enterprise–Juniper Networks merger. And the West Wing suspected her of leaking internal DOJ tensions to the press.
Last summer, two of Slater's top deputies were fired over the handling of the HPE settlement — a deal that Bondi's office ultimately negotiated directly, bypassing the antitrust division entirely. Then, just last Friday, Slater appeared to fire her own chief of staff via a post on X. Bondi overruled her.
That's a pattern. Not of a rogue employee, but of someone who stopped operating within the chain of command she was confirmed to serve under.
An unnamed administration official framed the decision in blunt operational terms:
"This is a bureaucratic agency of 115,000 people, and over 10,000 of which are lawyers. When we say to our people the President has an agenda, go and execute on this, we need to trust that that is going to be done, and that has not been happening this past year. We can't take another year to figure out how to get to a place where we're all in agreement on what that looks like. We don't have time. We have to go now."
Another official put it even more succinctly:
"This is about meeting the agenda on economic prosperity and affordability today, not in 4 years."
There's no ambiguity there. The White House views Slater's tenure as a year of lost momentum on an antitrust agenda that was supposed to be a signature populist achievement of this administration. A year they cannot afford to repeat.
Slater previously served as an economic advisor to JD Vance during his time in the Senate — a relationship that helped position her as a credible pick for the antitrust role. She was fluent in the populist-right critique of corporate consolidation, the kind of figure who could bridge the gap between traditional Republican deference to big business and the newer MAGA instinct that monopoly power hurts working Americans.
But when the situation at DOJ grew untenable, Vance chose to stay out of it. No life preserver came from the vice president's office. That silence tells you everything about how far the relationship between Slater and DOJ leadership had decayed. When your strongest political patron declines to intervene, the conversation is already over.
Slater's allies have pushed a counter-narrative — that Trump-friendly lobbyists advocating for HPE helped secure the merger and engineered the ouster of her deputies. The implication is that Slater was the true populist and was taken out by the corporatist wing.
Maybe. But that framing doesn't explain the Paris trip Bondi didn't authorize. It doesn't explain the alleged dishonesty about intelligence community consultations. It doesn't explain attempting to fire your chief of staff via a social media post without clearing it with your boss.
There is a version of this story where Slater was right on policy and wrong on everything else. The two aren't mutually exclusive. You can believe that aggressive antitrust enforcement against Big Tech is good and necessary — many conservatives do — while also recognizing that an appointee who cannot maintain the trust of the attorney general she reports to is an appointee who cannot execute that agenda.
The president makes the final call on Senate-confirmed officials. That call was made. Whatever the internal politics, the administration decided that alignment and execution matter more than ideological credentials on paper.
The real test isn't whether removing Slater was justified. It's what comes next. The populist antitrust agenda — challenging Big Tech's dominance, scrutinizing mergers that squeeze consumers and small competitors — was a genuine differentiator for this administration. It signaled that the new Republican Party wasn't just the Chamber of Commerce with a populist coat of paint.
Whoever fills Slater's seat will tell us whether the policy vision survives the personnel shakeup or whether it was always more fragile than it appeared. An aggressive replacement means the mission continues with someone who can actually work within DOJ's structure. A quiet corporate lawyer means the moment has passed.
Personnel is policy. It cuts both ways. The wrong person in the right job stalls the agenda. But removing them only matters if the right person follows.
The clock the administration cited — no time to waste, results now, not in four years — applies to the vacancy too.