The Federal Commerce Commission asked a federal judge on Wednesday to delay a trial in one case. accusing Amazon to use deceptive practices in its main subscription program, citing staff and budgetary challenges in the government agency.
Jonathan Cohen, a FTC lawyer, filed the application before the United States District Judge John Chun, who supervises the legal procedures of a 2023 lawsuit that the Commission filed against the Electronic Commerce Giant in the state of Washington.
“Our resource limitations are severe and really unique for this moment,” Cohen said during a status hearing on Wednesday. “We have lost employees in the agency, in our division and in 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, and added that some employees chose to leave the FTC after the “Bifurcation email on the way” Sent by the Efficient Department of Elon Musk’s government in January. Staff members who resigned For other reasons Nor have they been replaced due to a freezing of government contracting, he said.
Amazon’s trial had been scheduled to start in September. The FTC seeks to relax some of the deadlines in the case and a delay similar to a continuation of two months. The agency does not want to “retreat the trial more than a couple of months,” Cohen said.
Currently, the agency’s legal team is “running at a considerable cost” to comply with a discovery deadline at the end of April and at the same time deal with restrictive rules on the purchase of judicial documents and trips, Cohen explained.
Other factors could hinder personnel preparations for the trial, he said. In April, FTC employees will have to spend time packing and vacating their office building so they can move to “an abandoned USAID installation,” Cohen said.
Chun, the judge, asked how “things will be different in two months” with the problems that the agency is experiencing.
Cohen responded by saying that “he cannot guarantee if things will not be even worse.”
“But there are many reasons to believe … We have gone through the worst part of it, at least for a while,” he said.
During the hearing, John Hoston, a lawyer who represents Amazon, delayed the agency’s request.
