The Federal Trade Commission asked a federal judge on Wednesday to delay a trial in a case accusing Amazon of using deceptive practices in its Prime subscription program, citing staffing and budgetary challenges at the government agency.
Jonathan Cohen, a lawyer for the FTC, made the request before U.S. District Judge John Chun, who is overseeing the legal proceedings from a 2023 lawsuit the commission filed against the e-commerce giant in Washington state.
"Our resource constraints are severe and really unique to this moment," Cohen said during a status hearing on Wednesday. "We have lost employees in the agency, in our division and on the case team."
When the judge asked if the agency's challenges were due to recent cuts in the federal government, Cohen said it was, adding that some employees chose to leave the FTC following the "Fork in the road" email sent by Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency in January. Staff members who resigned for other reasons also have not been replaced due to a government hiring freeze, he said.
The Amazon trial had been scheduled to start in September. The FTC is seeking to relax some of the deadlines in the case and a delay akin to a two-month continuance. The agency does not want to "move the trial back more than a couple of months," Cohen said.
Currently, the agency's legal team is "racing at considerable cost" to meet a late April deadline for discovery while at the same time dealing with restrictive rules on purchasing court documents and travel, Cohen explained.
Other factors could hamper staffers' preparations for the trial, he said. In April, FTC employees will have to spend time packing up and vacating their office building so they can potentially move to "an abandoned USAID facility," Cohen said.
Chun, the judge, asked how "things are going to be different in two months" with the issues the agency is experiencing.
Cohen responded by saying he "cannot guarantee if things won't be even worse."
"But there are a lot of reasons to believe ... we have been through the brunt of it, at least for a while," he said.
During the hearing, John Hueston, an attorney representing Amazon, pushed back on the agency's request.
