This is Sarah Stewart Holland. This is Beth Silver's. You're listening to Pantsu Politics, where we take a different approach to the news. Hello, we're so glad that you're here with us for another new episode.

Today we're going to talk about the economy and specifically about employment. The Biden administration has used a bunch of different tools to try to improve the economy

in the United States and a lot of those efforts have been

underway behind the scenes because it takes a long time to do work in government

through administrative agencies and today we want to talk about the Federal Trade

Commission's decision to tell employers

they can no longer limit the opportunities available to us when we want to leave them.

Non-compete agreements have been a part of many contracts for people who do all kinds of work for a long time and those non-compete clauses limit what you can do in the same field or in a certain geographic area or in a certain time frame after you leave an

employer and the Federal Trade Commission has said that really hampers economic

opportunity and growth and we don't want it to happen anymore. To guide us

through this conversation to talk about the policy

and where it came from we are so thrilled to have Elizabeth Wilkins here. She is a

former chief of staff to the chair of the Federal Trade Commission so she

was part of making this change

and it's going to talk us through the arguments

and how we got here.

Now, we know that this regulation is being challenged in court.

We know from the Supreme Court term that just wrapped up that the courts are

fairly hostile to administrative agencies doing big things like this. So we'll see how that plays

out. But either way, the policy argument here is really important.

And even if the courts say that this is a step too far for the Federal Trade Commission, which

they may or may not, I don't know, but even if they do, we would like to be thinking

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