“Big Tech companies are some of the most powerful and politically active in the world. They have the ability to affect elections, suppress speech, and manipulate markets—all while avoiding accountability.”

Jake Denton: From Heritage Foundation Researcher to FTC Tech Chief at 25

The room where Jake Denton works is in Washington, D.C., on Pennsylvania Avenue. His title is Chief Technology Officer of the Federal Trade Commission. When he walks into a meeting about artificial intelligence regulation, or platform competition, or data broker practices, the agency’s lawyers and economists present their positions and he assesses the technical landscape. He decides what the FTC understands and what it misses.

He is 25 years old.

That number needs a moment. The FTC oversees the most consequential technology companies in the world. It has the power to subpoena, to litigate, to block acquisitions worth billions of dollars. Its enforcement actions can restructure markets. And the person now advising that agency on the technical dimensions of those decisions graduated from college roughly three years ago.

The quote at the top of this piece comes from the technology chapter of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s 900-page blueprint for reordering the federal government. It reads like a prosecution brief. It frames the largest technology companies as threats to democracy and market fairness alike. What it doesn’t say, embedded in that Heritage document, is that the person who helped write those arguments would soon be positioned inside the government—not as a critic standing outside, but as a senior official at the very agency empowered to act on them.

A Family in the Business of Conviction

Jake Denton is not a random hire. His grandfather was Jerry Falwell Sr., the founder of Liberty University and the architect of the Moral Majority, the political movement that fused evangelical Christianity with Republican electoral strategy in the late 1970s and reshaped American conservatism for a generation. The Falwell name is not incidental in Washington’s conservative ecosystem. It is foundational to it.

Denton came to the Heritage Foundation as a researcher in his early twenties, focused on what the right calls “Big Tech bias”—the argument that platforms like Google, Meta, and Twitter had systematically suppressed conservative voices and that the government had either failed to notice or chosen to ignore it. His work fit neatly into Heritage’s existing posture: skeptical of market power when that power was wielded by companies seen as culturally hostile, even as the foundation maintained its general opposition to regulatory expansion.

That tension is worth naming plainly. The Heritage Foundation’s public philosophy holds that government regulation typically distorts markets and limits freedom. It has argued against the administrative state, against the expansion of agency power, against what it calls Washington overreach. And yet Jake Denton was helping to build the intellectual case for an aggressive government confrontation with the technology sector. The framing was different—this was about bias, about cultural capture, about corporate censorship rather than market concentration—but the regulatory mechanism proposed was government force.

Project 2025 made the argument more concrete. The technology sections, to which Denton contributed, called for a more interventionist approach to the platforms. They called for reviewing Section 230, the liability shield that allows social media companies to host user content without responsibility for most of what’s posted. They called for using antitrust law and FTC authority more aggressively. The document’s authors were building a playbook for a Republican administration that would be willing to use the regulatory state against companies it viewed as political opponents.

Inside the Agency He Once Audited from the Outside

The FTC under the second Trump administration has moved in a direction that is harder to characterize than the prior administration’s version. The Biden-era FTC, under Lina Khan, pursued an aggressive antitrust agenda targeting mergers and monopoly power. It blocked acquisitions, sued Meta, challenged Microsoft. The Trump FTC has different priorities, and those priorities are, in part, what Denton’s appointment signals.

The current commission has shown more interest in questions of platform censorship and speech suppression than in the vertical integration cases that consumed the previous leadership. It has looked at what it frames as the anti-competitive dimensions of content moderation: the argument that when a dominant platform silences certain voices, it uses its market power to distort the information environment. This is not a mainstream antitrust theory, but it is the kind of argument that has circulated in conservative policy circles for years, and it is the kind of argument that Jake Denton spent his early career developing.

At 25, he now sits on the inside of the institution those arguments were aimed at. He attends briefings. He reviews technical submissions. He advises commissioners on what the engineering and data realities look like when lawyers are constructing enforcement theories. In the language of Washington, he is a subject matter expert. In the language of his biography, he is a person who spent his formative professional years building a critique of an institution and has now been handed a role inside it.

There is an obvious question embedded in that transition. If you believe an agency has historically misused its power—or failed to use it correctly, depending on your vantage point—does joining it represent a change in your views, or an opportunity to redirect the institution? The conservative movement’s answer, laid out explicitly in Project 2025, is the latter. The document’s entire premise is that presidential administrations need to place ideologically aligned personnel throughout the executive branch agencies in order to change what those agencies do. Jake Denton is, on this reading, not a contradiction. He is a fulfillment of the strategy.

What 25 Means in This Context

The age matters not because youth disqualifies. It matters because of what it reveals about the supply chain for this kind of appointment.

Denton did not arrive at the FTC after decades in private practice, after litigating technology cases, after building or running a technology company, after serving as a regulator who worked up through an agency. He arrived through the conservative policy pipeline: undergraduate degree, Heritage fellowship, Project 2025 contribution, political appointment. That pipeline is fast. It is designed to be fast. Organizations like Heritage function partly as finishing schools for exactly this kind of placement—training young conservatives in the right frameworks, connecting them to the networks that make appointments possible when a friendly administration takes office.

What Denton knows about technology he learned through the lens of that framework. Artificial intelligence as a question of bias in training data. Social media as a question of viewpoint discrimination. Data markets as a question of corporate surveillance of ordinary citizens. These are not illegitimate concerns. They are also not the full landscape of what a Chief Technology Officer at a federal regulatory agency might need to understand: the technical architecture of algorithmic systems, the competitive dynamics of cloud infrastructure, the ways that large language models actually fail and why, the economics of network effects at scale.

Whether his preparation is adequate is a question his tenure will answer, not his résumé. He is not the first person to arrive in a senior government technology role without deep technical experience. Washington is full of them. The question is always the same: does the person with the title do the reading, build the relationships with people who know more, and ask the right questions? Or do they retrofit the framework they already brought into the building?

On the wall of Project 2025’s technology chapter, there is a sentence that reads: “The next conservative president must be prepared to move quickly.” It is a sentence about speed, about urgency, about the understanding that political windows close and that the machinery of the federal government is easier to redirect at the beginning of an administration than in the middle. Jake Denton’s appointment is one data point in that effort—a young man with a clear worldview, placed early inside an institution with significant power over the technology landscape that his movement has spent years arguing about.

His grandfather built a political organization by convincing people that the cultural terrain was being lost and that the only response was organized, sustained engagement. Jake Denton is engaging differently—through regulatory theory, through technical advising, through the quieter levers of an administrative agency that most Americans never think about until it does something that affects them.

He is 25. The FTC’s enforcement actions can take years to resolve. Whatever Denton builds or shapes inside the agency in this term, the effects will likely outlast the administration that placed him there. That is usually how it works. The people who show up young, who learn the institution from the inside, who stay long enough to become the ones who train the next generation of staff—those are the people who actually change what an agency does.

Whether that is what happens here, no one knows yet. He has barely started.