While Lina Khan was the Biden-era chairwoman of the Federal Trade Commission, she ran roughshod over due process in expanding her authority to regulate business.

Many corporate boards of directors turned down good ideas because they didn’t want to waste time and money in court fighting her expansive rulings. She was ultimately slapped down in court on most of her initiatives, but by then the damage was largely done.

So much of American business breathed a sigh of relief when Khan left office in January to retreat to an academic post at Columbia Law School in New York City. But Crusader Khan hasn’t taken long to mount a comeback. She’s just become co-chairwoman of the transition team of New York’s mayor-elect, Zohran Mamdani.

No one doubts that Khan will be at Mamdani’s side once he takes office in January. Her official role isn’t defined yet, but it looks as if she will be his regulator in chief.

She’s already scouring city and state laws for legal authority to impose Mamdani’s radical agenda. Khan says she’s compiling “a full accounting” of all the powers that Mamdani “can ultimately deploy” in office.

Her search has already unearthed a 56-year-old New York City law that bars business practices deemed “unconscionable” — what the digital news platform Semafor calls “a designation expansive enough to delight any regulator.” The law been used only once in its history (during a Covid dispute over the price of face masks), but Khan sees it as a way to do everything from cutting the price of beer at Yankee Stadium to curbing algorithmic pricing.

It’s clear that Mamdani wants to go full speed ahead with his agenda of “democratic socialism.” In his Election Night victory speech, he boasted, “We will prove that there is no problem too large for government to solve, and no concern too small for it to care about.”

That philosophy also defined Khan’s rocky tenure at the Federal Trade Commission. She first rose to prominence in 2017 when, at age 28, she published a paper in the Yale Law Journal questioning decades-long views about what an illegal monopoly should be and how antitrust laws were being applied to tech companies. She won more plaudits from progressives when she helped write a congressional report in 2020 that called for the breakup of tech monopolies.

The FTC that Khan took over in June 2021 was anything but a doormat for monopoly-seeking firms. In fact, antitrust enforcement in 2020, the last year of the first Trump administration, hit its highest numbers in decades.

Khan’s aggressive antitrust approach soon ran into the FTC’s culture of sober and fair-minded rulemaking. In 2022, she moved to block Meta’s purchase of a tiny virtual reality fitness app on the novel theory that it would eliminate possible future “nascent” VR fitness app competition from Meta itself. The suit attracted a great deal of mockery and was dismissed by former FTC Chairman William Kovacic as a “deliberately experimental” flop that the FTC was forced to drop in 2023. But Khan pressed on, relying on discredited case law from the antitrust era of the 1940s and 1950s and contorting facts to fit her ideological crusades.

During her tenure, the commission even banned Rite Aid from using facial recognition to stop shoplifting.

Her management style also took a real toll on the agency. Like every federal agency, FTC employees respond annually to a Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey, whereby they grade their workplace. In 2020, the last year under Trump appointees, 87 percent of surveyed FTC employees agreed that senior agency officials maintained high standards of honesty and integrity. By early 2023, that share had plunged to 49 percent

Christine Wilson, a Republican FTC commissioner, had enough in February 2023 and announced her resignation saying the agency had replaced a thoughtful process with chaos. In an earlier speech in 2022, she lamented, “Under Chair Khan, morale has plummeted, and we have seen an exodus of experienced lawyers and economists. The FTC may take a generation to recover from this loss of institutional knowledge and expertise. Moreover, we have seen a significant decline in the number of enforcement matters.”

Hedge fund manager Daniel Loeb, who observed Khan’s tenure at the FTC, reacted with fury at the news that Khan was co-chairing Mamdani’s transition team: “I would hire this person if I were dead set on crafting Soviet style centralized control regime, instituting repressive policies and destroying the economy,” Loeb posted last week on X.

It’s fair to say that Khan’s record shows that prudence and restraint are not in her policy DNA. In 2021, she was asked by New York magazine whether she worried about being too aggressive at the FTC: “Going too far? Doing too much? When identifying the top ten threats to this agency, that’s not on the list.’”

Now Lina Khan may have a new canvas for her projects in New York City, the financial center of the world. As Bette Davis famously said in the movie All About Eve, “Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy night.”