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In a nutshell: The FTC wants a judge to delay the agency’s trial against Amazon over allegations it used deceptive marketing practices for its Prime subscription program. The reason for the request is that Elon Musk and the Trump administration’s layoffs of federal workers has left the FTC short on employees and funds.
The FTC said in its 2023 complaint against Amazon that the company knowingly tricks people into signing up for Prime through the use of “Dark Patterns,” a reference to the number of options at the checkout suggesting people sign up for automatically renewing Prime subscriptions. It also alleged that canceling the subscription is a task involving multiple unnecessary steps, which could cause some people to give up before the end.
A trial was due to begin in September, but FTC lawyer Jonathan Cohen has asked US District Judge John Chun to postpone it by two months.
“Our resource constraints are severe and really unique to this moment,” Cohen said during a status hearing on Wednesday, via Associated Press. “We have lost employees in the agency, in our division and on the case team.”
Cohen confirmed to the judge that the FTC’s resource challenges stemmed from the recent cuts made to federal government employees.
Consistent with President @realDonaldTrump‘s instructions, all federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week.
Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.
– Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 22, 2025
Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has laid off over 62,500 federal workers since its inception. Cohen said some FTC employees had chosen to leave in January after DOGE’s “Fork in the Road” email, which offered a deferred resignation program that allowed employees to announce their resignation effective September 30, 2025. In return, participants would retain full pay and benefits until that date.
Adding to the staffing problems has been the government hiring freeze, which Cohen said has prevented the FTC from replacing staff members who resigned for other reasons.
Cohen said the FTC doesn’t want to push the trial date back by more than a couple of months, but he still couldn’t guarantee it would be enough time for the agency to address its issues. He couldn’t even guarantee that things won’t be worse by November.
The FTC’s legal team is “racing at considerable cost” to meet a late April deadline for discovery, Cohen said. It is also dealing with restrictive rules on purchasing court documents and travel.
Amazon doesn’t want the delay. One of its attorneys said most of the FTC’s legal team assigned to the case were still employed by the agency, and that the FTC lacks grounds for a delay.
Amazon denies it engaged in deceptive practices related to its Prime subscription service. If the FTC wins the suit, Amazon could potentially refund affected Prime customers.
