FTC seeks delay of Amazon trial, citing staffing shortages and budgetary challenges

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 into “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. He said most of the FTC attorneys assigned to the Amazon case were still employed by the agency.

Even in the case of staff turnover, the government still lacks the grounds to seek a delay since changes in legal teams happen often, Hueston argued. Amazon executives and trial lawyers already cleared their schedules for a September trial, and the company has wanted to clear its name for more than two years, he said.

“We really want to keep the date” for the trial, Hueston said.

Amazon Prime enrollment

The lawsuit, which was brought under former FTC Chair Lina Khan, alleged Amazon had enrolled consumers in the Prime program without consent and made it difficult for them to cancel their subscriptions.

The agency filed the case months before it submitted an antitrust lawsuit against the retail and technology company, accusing it of having monopolistic control over online markets. Attorneys for that case, which is scheduled to go to trial in October 2026, presented economic arguments in court last week.

Like other tech companies, Amazon has been attempting to forge friendlier ties with President Donald Trump, who repeatedly criticized the company during his first term.

In December, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos said he was “optimistic” about Trump’s second term. The same month, the company said it would donate $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund. Bezos, along with other tech leaders, was also a guest at the inauguration.

This week, Amazon’s Prime Video service began streaming “The Apprentice,” the long-running TV show that boosted Trump’s profile before he ran for president. The company is also working on a documentary that offers an “unprecedented behind-the-scenes look” into the life of first lady Melania Trump.

Meanwhile, Bezos has made changes to The Washington Post, which he owns, that some critics have cast as favorable to Trump.

Before the election, Bezos defended the newspaper’s decision not to endorse a presidential candidate as “right” and “principled.” He rejected speculation that he ordered the non-endorsement to protect his business interests.