Earlier this week, the Federal Trade Commission claimed that it could not pursue a case against Amazon due to the large resource and budget cuts being made by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. However, in a bizarre reversal, the company took back its previous statements, claiming that the FTC did, indeed, have the resources to move forward with the case.
The trial case in question involves Amazon’s alleged manipulative practices in signing users up for subscriptions. At a hearing on Wednesday, Jonathan Cohen, an attorney for the FTC, asked US District Judge John Chun to delay the trial until September due to the resource and personnel shortfalls at the agency, Bloomberg reports.
“We have lost employees in the agency, in our division, and on our case team,” Cohen told the judge, further noting that “there is an extremely severe resource shortfall in terms of money and personnel.” Cohen further said that the agency was so strapped that it “may not be able to purchase the transcript from Wednesday’s hearing.”
The statement followed an announcement that DOGE had canceled some 200,000 government credit cards across the federal government, severely limiting the spending that those agencies could make.
Not long after the hearing, however, the attorney reached back out to the court to claim that he had been mistaken. “I was wrong,” Cohen said. “The Commission does not have resource constraints, and we are fully prepared to litigate this case,” the lawyer relayed. “Please be assured that the FTC will meet whatever schedule and deadlines the court sets.”
Amazon has shot down the idea that the government isn’t prepared for the case. “There has been no showing on this call that the government does not have the resources to proceed to trial with the trial date as presently set,” said John Hueston, the company’s lawyer. “What I heard is that they’ve got the whole trial team still intact. Maybe there’s going to be an office move. And by the way, both in government and private sector, I’ve never heard of an office move being more than a few days disruptive.”
It isn’t clear what’s going on here, though it feels like just another day in Trump presidency 2.0—a realm where strange things are happening all the time. Gizmodo reached out to the FTC for some clarity on the situation and will update this story if it responds.
