October is proving to be a busy month for Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chair Lina Khan. As she completes her term, Khan’s calendar has the feel of a political farewell tour.

Chair Khan appeared with Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Greg Casar in Austin, with Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi in Chicago, with Rep. Mark Pocan in Wisconsin, and with Rep. Ruben Gallego in Arizona. These are cast as a chance to elicit public comment, such as the “renters listening session” Khan is holding with Rep. Gallego. However, there are two problems with this characterization.

First, the politicians Khan is appearing with are all progressive Democrats. Consider Rep. Casar, affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America, or Rep. Gallego, who vows to replace the moderation of departing Sen. Kyrsten Sinema with a solidly blue voting record.

Second, Khan is appearing with candidates for re-election weeks before Nov. 5, when every appearance is a campaign event. Chair Khan is making celebrity appearances to build enthusiasm from progressive voters and donors. This is a radical departure for a white-collar law enforcement official with the power of life and death over businesses and their employees’ jobs. Khan’s appearances are also possible violations of the Hatch Act, which prohibits the use of official authority to influence or affect an election.

Yet Khan’s tour is only one of the more theatrical acts of her norm-busting leadership of an agency that, until now, was highly regarded as a unique center of legal and economic expertise. For decades before Khan, FTC experts often appeared at outside venues with consumer groups, industry, economists, labor, and legal scholars to test assumptions and discover ground truth about the market for the agency’s deliberations. The Commission’s majority appointed by the president also took pains to solicit the minority’s views. A search for common ground was not considered ideological betrayal, and both sides were often willing to accede to the better argument.

Then Khan smashed into this delicate clockwork with a sledgehammer. A mere four years out of Yale Law School, backed by the puffery of an adoring media, Khan went to work to dismantle this system. Khan unleashed her first abrasive chief of staff, Jen Howard (who sported a silver necklace at work with the f-word in cursive lettering), to issue an edict prohibiting FTC’s expert staff from attending outside events.

“Under Chair Khan, morale has plummeted, and we have seen an exodus of experienced lawyers and economists,” wrote Christine Wilson, one of the agency’s two Republican commissioners, before resigning in disgust. “The FTC may take a generation to recover from this loss of institutional knowledge and expertise.” Insiders tell me that at least 73 senior career staff have departed the agency under pressure from Khan.

No surprise, then, that soon after Khan’s arrival, FTC employees gave Chair Khan and her team low marks for “honesty and integrity,” plunging the rating of the organization from first place to last among agencies in an Office of Personnel Management survey. Expect no such bad reviews in the future, however, from an agency newly repopulated with Khan acolytes drawn from left-leaning NGOs and universities.

As Khan prepares to depart when the Senate confirms her replacement next year, she is cementing in place progressive control of the FTC. In September, the new FTC staff voted 415-25 to unionize. No future president will be able to re-professionalize this staff because it will be almost impossible to fire these new members of the National Treasury Employees Union.

As a result, even if a Republican is appointed Chair of the FTC, he or she can expect more of what Wilson has called “dishonesty and subterfuge” that has eroded the agency’s spirit of debate and due process. As Khan takes her star turn, perhaps to an endowed chair in academia, her legacy in Washington will be that of a once-admired agency transformed into another Washington factory churning out partisan hackwork.

Above all, Khan has succeeded in making it difficult for any future FTC Chair to return to the consumer welfare standard, which has guided bipartisan antitrust enforcement for 45 years. The FTC is striving to replace that standard with antitrust policies that pledge to protect workers, unions, less efficient competitors, and even DEI priorities. With such a long menu of possible offenses, the FTC now has the discretion of a Moscow prosecutor to haul any corporation or executive up on tenterhooks. In the words of Tim Wu, the éminence grise of progressive antitrust, the FTC can now be “a policeman at the elbow” of every business.

The wonder is that so few moderate Democratic and Republican lawyers, Members of Congress, and antitrust experts—including Federalist Society luminaries—fail to realize that Khan and her cohorts are about extending government power over all business. They have never been about anything other than that.

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Robert H. Bork Jr. is the president of the Antitrust Education Project.