For months, speculation has raged in Washington over the future of Lina Khan, the Federal Trade Commission chair and face of the Biden administration’s crusade against monopoly power. Overturning decades of antitrust norms, charged by Khan with failing to curb extreme concentrations of corporate power, the administration has routinely scrutinized major acquisitions traditionally ignored by Khan’s predecessors, forcing companies like Lockheed Martin and Nvidia to abandon multibillion-dollar deals in court.

Opponents of Khan—who is often described as a legal “wunderkind” or “prodigy,” though invariably as “young”—include a number of powerful investors and CEOs known as prominent backers of the Democratic Party; billionaires with ties to businesses long under the FTC’s microscope.

The donors, which include LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman and media mogul Barry Diller, have openly urged Kamala Harris to replace Khan in the event she wins in November, a move that would likely spell disaster for president Joe Biden’s antitrust revolution.

Diller, for his part, laid into Khan publicly in July, calling her a “dope” on national television, a remark that he later walked back, calling her “smart,” but “disrupting sensible business combinations.” To the ire of many of Khan’s supporters, the Harris campaign has remained silent on her future.

Neither the Harris campaign nor the FTC responded to a request for comment. Diller did not immediately respond. Hoffman declined to comment.

Roughly 80 percent of Democrats feel that the government should be doing more to take on corporate monopolies, compared to only 3 percent who say it should be doing less, according to new polling. Nearly 90 percent of Democrats, meanwhile, feel that lobbyists and corporate executives hold too much power over the government.

The same poll, commissioned by the Tech Oversight Project, found that more than three-fourths of Democrats feel Big Tech wields monopoly power in ways that harm consumers and small businesses. Only 7 percent said the companies should face no repercussions, since they have continued to innovate.

“Democratic voters want to build on the Biden-Harris administration’s record of protecting competition, holding monopolies accountable for breaking the law, and lowering the cost of living for everyday families,” says Sacha Haworth, the project’s executive director, who favors Khan as the “natural favorite” to carry on this campaign.

Due perhaps in part to polling like this, there are strong indications that the billionaires are wasting their breath when it comes to the ousting of Khan. Last month, the Democratic Party adopted a platform that celebrated Khan’s crackdown on “corporate greed,” while calling for further investigations into the “potentially harmful effects of corporate consolidation” in Big Pharma and across the media industry. While Khan gave no speeches at the convention, the party’s promise to rid America of “monopolies that crush workers and small businesses and startups” was delivered—perhaps even more potently—by Biden’s secretary of commerce, Gina Raimondo, a consummate corporate advocate.

Khan supporters, alarmed that Harris has yet to rally to the legal star’s side, erected a mock website this month, labeling her “Bad for Billionaires,” while satirizing some of the Democrats’ biggest donors, Hoffman and Diller among them. “Lina Khan must be fired,” the page declares, “so we can continue our untrammeled profiteering!”

After officially hiking tariffs on Chinese electric vehicle imports earlier this month, the US government is getting even more serious about keeping China-made autos out of the country. On Monday, the US Commerce Department proposed a new rule that would ban some Chinese- and Russian-made automotive hardware and software from the US, with software restrictions starting as early as 2026.

The Biden administration says the move is needed for national security reasons, given how central technology is to today’s increasingly sophisticated cars. In announcing the proposed ban, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo cited vehicles’ internet-connected cameras, microphones, and GPS equipment. “It doesn’t take much imagination to understand how a foreign adversary with access to this information could pose a serious risk to both our national security and the privacy of US citizens,” she said.

The US government’s move comes as China has dramatically increased the number of affordable vehicles, and especially electric ones, it makes and sells overseas. Chinese auto exports grew by more than 30 percent in just the first half of this year, setting off alarm bells in Europe and the US, where officials worry inexpensively made Chinese vehicles could overwhelm domestic industry. The US and Europe had moved to make it harder and more expensive for China to sell its autos in those regions, but the Chinese automakers have responded by setting up manufacturing bases in Eastern Europe, Africa, and Mexico—all of which might one day provide a loophole to allow more Chinese-designed and engineered vehicles into new Western markets.

Still, the proposed rule focuses on security rather than competition. Raimondo had previously raised the specter of foreign actors using hijacked connected car technology to cause mayhem on the US public roads. “Imagine if there were thousands or hundreds of thousands of Chinese connected vehicles on American roads that could be immediately and simultaneously disabled by somebody in Beijing,” she said in February.

That situation isn’t quite realistic, given how few Chinese and Russian firms supply automotive software or hardware in the US right now. A proposed software and hardware ban is more preemptive than a response to any immediate security risk, says Steve Man, the global head of auto research at Bloomberg Intelligence, a research and advisory firm. “PRC and Russian automakers do not currently play a significant role in the US auto market, and US drivers right now are safe,” a senior Biden administration official told WIRED.

Because the rule would apply to any connected vehicle, not just electric ones, it would create even stronger prohibitions against Chinese-made auto tech. “If the 100 percent tariffs on made-in-China EVs were a wall, the proposed ban on connected vehicles would be a death sentence for China EV Inc. aiming to enter the US,” says Lei Xing, the former chief editor at China Auto Review and an independent analyst. Under such a rule, he says, the prospects of seeing Chinese EVs on sale in the US in the coming decade is “nearly zero.”