A filing in federal district court in Arizona suggests the Federal Trade Commission may be preparing to drop the 2023 lawsuit it brought against Grand Canyon Education, a case alleging that Grand Canyon University’s for-profit arm and its CEO, Brian Mueller, deceptively advertised the costs of its doctoral programs, misrepresented the non-profit status of the operation, and made deceptive, abusive, and illegal phone calls to prospective students. 

A motion submitted to the court on June 16 by the FTC and Grand Canyon asked for a 60-day delay in discovery proceedings in the case. According to the filing, the two sides “have discussed a proposed nonsettlement resolution of this matter” and the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection has recommended that outcome. The lawyers for each side told the court, “If the FTC Commissioners approve a non-settlement resolution of this matter, further litigation will not be necessary.” 

U.S. District Judge Dominic Lanza responded by issuing an order extending pre-trial deadlines in the case by 60 days, as requested.

The court filing certainly implies that the FTC plans to drop the Grand Canyon case. (The FTC filed a notice with the court on June 30 that Michael Tankersley, a longtime FTC and consumer lawyer, was withdrawing as lead counsel in the case.)

Dropping the suit against Grand Canyon would be a terrible outcome for students and taxpayers.

The FTC’s complaint documents extensive abuses by the operation.

The FTC alleged that Grand Canyon told prospective students that the total cost of the school’s “accelerated” doctoral programs was equal to the cost of 20 courses, or 60 credits, but in fact Grand Canyon required almost all doctoral students to enroll in additional “continuation courses” that added thousands to the price. 

The FTC lawsuit also claimed that Grand Canyon engaged in abusive telemarketing calls, phoning people who had specifically requested that they not be called, in violation of federal laws.

But like much of the federal government, the FTC is a far different place than it was before Donald Trump’s second inauguration. Once back in office, Trump illegally moved to fire the two Democratic appointees to the five-member FTC, both of whom subsequently sued to reverse the dismissals.

Trump picked for FTC chair Andrew Ferguson, a sitting commissioner and former aide to Senator Mitch McConnell and ex-law clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas. Under Ferguson, the FTC already has dropped lawsuits alleging anticompetitive conduct by PepsiCo and Microsoft. Meanwhile, the Commission has launched an investigation of the progressive-leaning research group Media Matters, accusing the group of colluding with other non-profits to steer advertising away from Elon Musk’s X site. Media Matters, which said X was selling ads placed alongside antisemitic tweets, then sued the FTC. 

Ferguson is scheduled to speak Wednesday at an FTC “workshop” session on “The Dangers of ‘Gender-Affirming Care’ for Minors.” According to an FTC press release, other participants will include “doctors, medical ethicists, whistleblowers, detransitioners, and parents of detransitioners.” The release says that the workshop “will help the FTC to understand whether consumers are being or have been exposed to false or unsupported claims about ‘gender-affirming care’ and to gauge the harms consumers may be experiencing.” 

An FTC spokesperson declined to comment on the Grand Canyon case.  Grand Canyon has not responded to a request for comment. 

If the FTC does drop the case, it will echo the action taken by the Trump Department of Education in May — quietly cancelling a $37 million fine the Department imposed on Grand Canyon in 2023, based on detailed findings that overlap with the allegations in the FTC complaint. 

Grand Canyon, which bills itself as a Christian school, had waged a public campaign claiming it was attacked by the Biden administration on the basis of politics and religious persecution.

A Department of Education spokesperson, Ellen Keast, in acknowledging that the Department had cancelled the fine, ratified Grand Canyon’s claim of victimization. “Unlike the previous Administration,” Keast said, “we will not persecute and prosecute colleges and universities based on their religious affiliation.”

Left unaddressed is that, while Mueller claims Grand Canyon is a Christian corporate victim, many of the actual human victims, the students victimized by the school, are themselves Christians. 

Like Trump education secretary Linda McMahon, FTC officials now appear ready to let Grand Canyon off the hook, despite its egregious abuses against not only students but also the American taxpayers who fund student financial aid.

Phoenix-based Grand Canyon, which enrolled some 125,000 students in-person and online in the most recent academic year, gets the largest amount of federal student aid of any college or university in the country. GCU received $978 million from taxpayers for Department of Education federal student grants and loans in 2023-24 out of $1.46 billion in revenue, and received additional federal funding for student aid from the departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs.

Part of Grand Canyon’s righteous anger toward the Department of Education during Biden’s term focused on the Department’s refusal to recognize Grand Canyon as a non-profit school for purposes of Department rules, even though, after Grand Canyon converted its school from for-profit to non-profit, the IRS granted the school that status for tax purposes. But the ties between supposed non-profit Grand Canyon University and for-profit Grand Canyon Education are so blatant — GCU sends most of its revenue to publicly-traded GCE, and Brian Mueller is the head of both operations — that GCU’s non-profit status was rejected not by Biden education secretary Miguel Cardona, but by his predecessor, deeply Christian and deeply for-profit college-loving Betsy DeVos. (Last November, a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit reversed a district court decision upholding the Department’s denial of non-profit status to GCU and remanded to the Department to revisit the decision under a different legal standard.)

The Trump administration’s reckless failure to hold Grand Canyon accountable will not end GCU’s legal problems. In June 2024, students filed a class action lawsuit against Grand Canyon Education, alleging that the company “orchestrated a deceitful racketeering scheme by misleading prospective students about the true cost of doctoral degrees at Grand Canyon University….”  On May 6, a federal judge in Arizona rejected all but one of the arguments raised by GCE in a motion to dismiss, meaning the case will move forward on most of the students’ claims.