White House antitrust adviser Tim Wu to return to Columbia University: report

A key architect of the Biden administration’s antitrust enforcement strategy will return to his academic post at Columbia University later this year, according to Bloomberg News.

Tim Wu is expected to leave the White House in the coming months and resume his antitrust law teaching post at Columbia Law School.

He has held the role of special assistant to the president for technology and competition policy within the Biden administration since March 2021. During that time, the White House has encouraged federal government departments to ramp up scrutiny of potentially anticompetitive mergers, including through the publication of a sweeping executive order intended to promote competition.

The order kickstarted 72 initiatives across more than a dozen federal agencies, with a particular focus on the industries of technology, health care and agriculture.

Wu has been a professor at Columbia Law School since 2006, and is known for coining the term net neutrality.

Outside academia, he has held a range of posts including as enforcement counsel in the New York Attorney General’s Office, and as a competition policy adviser for the National Economic Council during the Barack Obama administration. He has also worked in antitrust enforcement at the Federal Trade Commission and in 2014 was a Democratic primary candidate for lieutenant governor of New York.

Commenting on the report on Twitter, Wu said: “Rumors of my leaving the WH are greatly exaggerated— still a lot of work to do!”