During the Biden administration and under the leadership of then-Chair Lina Khan, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) adopted sweeping changes to the Hart-Scott-Rodino (HSR) premerger notification requirements that went into effect on February 10, 2025.
By the FTC’s own admission, these changes substantially increased the volume of information and the number of documentary attachments required to properly notify the enforcement agencies of a proposed transaction and, by conservative estimates, imposed a roughly fourfold increase in the time needed to prepare the HSR filing.
Prior to February 10, 2025, various business groups sued, seeking injunctive relief and claiming, among other things, that the FTC had exceeded its statutory authority when it adopted the changes to the HSR premerger notification requirements.
On August 8, 2025, the American Hospital Association and the Federation of American Hospitals filed an amicus brief in support of the request for injunctive relief. These associations argued that the HSR form changes were unnecessary, as the FTC was unable to identify any potentially anticompetitive hospital merger that went undetected under the prior reporting requirements. Furthermore, they argued, this one-size-fits-all approach to changes to the reporting requirements acts as a tax on the hospital industry and seeks little more than to dissuade mergers in an industry already pressed to find ways to overcome severe economic difficulties.
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For additional information about the issues discussed in this Antitrust Byte, or if you have any other antitrust concerns, please contact the attorneys listed on this page or the Epstein Becker Green attorney who regularly handles your legal matters.
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