The Federal Trade Commission is moving to push back a trial set to determine if Amazon tricked customers into signing up for Prime subscriptions.
At a Zoom status hearing on Wednesday, the FTC officially asked US District Judge John Chun to delay the trial. According to the FTC’s attorney, Jonathan Cohen, the agency needs two months to prepare beyond the September 22 start date, blaming recent “staffing and budgetary shortfalls” stemming from the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), CNBC reported.
“We have lost employees in the agency, in our division, and on our case team,” Cohen said, explaining that “there is an extremely severe resource shortfall in terms of money and personnel,” Bloomberg reported. Cuts are apparently so bad, Cohen told Chun that the FTC is stuck with a $1 cap on any government credit card charges and “may not be able to purchase the transcript from Wednesday’s hearing,” Bloomberg reported.
Further threatening to scramble the agency’s trial preparation, the FTC anticipates that downsizing may require a move to another office “unexpectedly,” Cohen told Chun.
Amazon does not agree that a delay is necessary. The e-commerce giant’s attorney, John Hueston, told Chun that “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.”
“What I heard is that they’ve got the whole trial team still intact,” Hueston argued. “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.”
At the hearing, Chun appeared confused about how the extra time would benefit the FTC, which he said is “in crisis now, as far as resources” go, without any signs that circumstances “will be different in two months.”
Seemingly acknowledging that DOGE’s work is far from done, Cohen told Chun that he “cannot guarantee if things won’t be even worse” at a later date.
“But there’s a lot of reason to believe” the FTC “may have been through the brunt of it, at least for a little while,” Cohen said.
The largest batch of layoffs so far was in February when DOGE cut more than 62,000 federal workers, affecting roughly 18 agencies, according to Newsweek’s tracker. But recently, a notable decline in public support for DOGE and a court order requiring all probationary employees wrongfully terminated to be promptly rehired spurred Trump to start limiting DOGE’s authority, NBC News reported.
It’s in this climate that Cohen seemingly anticipates a potential lull in DOGE meddling allowing the FTC to get back to examining the Amazon case ahead of a major trial that has gone so far as to seek to hold Amazon executives personally liable for creating a supposedly “labyrinthine” Prime cancellation process allegedly designed to dupe millions into signing up for the service.