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.”
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