Oregon’s Justice Department plans to take a more aggressive approach to preventing monopolies and high-profile mergers in the state.

On Wednesday, the state Legislature approved 16 new positions under Attorney General Dan Rayfield dedicated to investigate and fight corporate mergers.

“Corporations are being allowed to consolidate unchecked - with no federal oversight,” Rayfield said in a statement.

The new positions approved Wednesday include five assistant attorneys general, four paralegals, six legal secretaries and administrative staff, and one economist. It would double the number of attorneys and triple the office’s capacity in the ODOJ Antitrust Division, according to Rayfield’s office.

Grocery prices are increasing. There are fewer cable and internet providers. And ticket prices are becoming increasingly unaffordable, the attorney general said.

“Oregon and other states are now the last line of defense to protect working families and that’s what drove the urgency,” said Rayfield, a Democrat who was elected in 2024.

In a presentation to state lawmakers this week, Leslie Wu, a policy adviser to Rayfield, said there have been other times in the country’s history when a few people — think the Rockefellers and Carnegies — were able to amass great amounts of wealth (in their case by creating oil and steel monopolies) while the working class struggled. It’s not dissimilar to what is happening today, she said.

Under Rayfield, the state is already part of an effort to block Nexstar Media Group Inc. from buying Tegna Inc., which would create the largest local broadcaster in the country and impact local news across Oregon. The merger would almost certainly result in job losses and likely higher cable prices across Oregon, according to Rayfield’s office.

Two longtime Portland competitors would share the same corporate owner.

Nexstar owns KOIN-TV, the CBS affiliate. Tegna owns KGW-TV, the NBC affiliate.

Rayfield said he’s taking on more antitrust cases as he sees the federal government moving away from the effort.

Oregon led a multi-state coalition that sued and ultimately won a weekslong trial in which a federal jury determined Live Nation and Ticketmaster were operating as a monopoly and overcharging for concert tickets. Oregon was also part of a group that blocked a merger between Kroger and Albertsons, which would have been the largest grocery merger in the nation’s history.

The 16 new positions will be funded through attorney fees from the court cases and will not tap into the state’s general fund.

Some Republicans questioned the legislative emergency board’s approval of the new positions.

The legislative emergency board is made up of members from both legislative chambers and acts while the Legislature is not in session. It has the power to allocate emergency funds. State Rep. Dwayne Yunker, R-Grants Pass, said Oregon is already ranked as one of the least business-friendly states in the nation, and he said now Democrats are unleashing 16 new “anti-business crusaders to aggressively wage war on our private sector.”

Yunker said Oregon is building a “government shakedown machine.”

“Worse yet, the sheer scale of this expansion is completely unhinged from reality,” Yunker said in a statement. “California, a state ten times our size, recently added 22 antitrust positions. For a state of Oregon’s size, a proportional increase would be 2 or 3 positions, not 16. The Democrat majority is actively weaponizing the Oregon Department of Justice’s regulatory pipeline, and it has to stop.”

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2026/06/17/antitrust-division-hiring-oregon/