During the Spring of 2025, the FTC launched an inquiry in response to Executive Order 14267, Reducing Anti-Competitive Regulatory Barriers, to identify unnecessary regulations that exclude new market entrants, protect dominant incumbents, and predetermine economic winners and losers. On September 16, 2025, the Commission’s Chairman Andrew N. Ferguson submitted recommendations for deleting or revising anticompetitive regulations across the entire federal government to the Office of Management and Budget. 

Amongst the recommendations, this report suggested the possibility of amending the scope of the Commission’s Amplifier Rule, 16 CFR 432, in two ways. First, the Commission may want to consider carving out devices that were designed, manufactured, or packaged prior to the August 2024 effective date. The cost of retesting and/or repackaging the devices may justify excluding these devices from the new testing requirements. Second, the Commission may want to consider carving out certain integrated devices from the Rule. The standardized testing procedure of the Rule works well with component amplifiers but not devices with built-in amplifiers (e.g. soundbars). The Rule may lead to power output disclosures that are inconsistent with the power output obtained by certain integrated devices.