Dive Brief:

• The Justice Department requested a temporary stay Wednesday in its 2024 antitrust lawsuit against Visa due to the lack of agency funding from Congress. The government also asked the court to extend deadlines for the parties the same number of days as the government shutdown lasts.
• Without funding, DOJ attorneys and employees “are generally prohibited from working, even on a voluntary basis, except in very limited circumstances such as ‘emergencies involving the safety of human life or the protection of property,’” DOJ attorney Craig Conrath wrote in a letter to U.S. District Judge John Koeltl. Visa does not oppose the stay request, the DOJ said.
• Federal courts will operate as usual until Oct. 17 using “court fee balances and other funds not dependent on a new appropriation,” the U.S. Courts said Wednesday in a press release.

Dive Insight:

While Visa does not oppose Koeltl pausing the proceedings temporarily, the card network “requests that any stay imposed by the court not cover negotiations and obligations related to third-party document subpoenas issued by Visa,” Conrath wrote.

“We greatly regret any disruption caused by these circumstances,” the DOJ letter said.

The DOJ, under the Biden administration, alleged that Visa operated an illegal monopoly in the debit card market. The lawsuit has carried on under the Trump administration.

San Francisco-based Visa handles more than 60% of U.S. debit card transactions on its network, collecting more than $7 billion annually in processing fees, according to the complaint, which was filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. Mastercard is a distant second in the market, with less than a quarter of the debit-processing market, the lawsuit said.

In June, Koeltl denied Visa’s motion to dismiss the complaint, which alleged that Visa imposes agreements on merchants and banks that exclude potential competitors from debit processing. 

Visa has denied the claims and said it doesn’t have a monopoly on debit card transactions.

Prior to the government funding lapse, Visa and the DOJ told the court they are making progress in their negotiations about the amount of electronic debit card data Visa will produce for discovery. The parties “are substantially closer to finalizing the scope of data to be provided,” they said in a Sept. 26 status report.

The government has narrowed some of its data requests to address Visa’s objections about the relevance of some material and difficulties of extracting large data sets from Visa’s system, the DOJ said. The government has given Visa its “finalized data field requests” for four of six data categories, the DOJ said.

Americans purchase more than $4 trillion worth of goods and services with debit cards each year, according to the September 2024 complaint. Visa’s monopoly in the debit card payments market adds billions of dollars in extra fees U.S. consumers pay when merchants increase prices to cover added costs for debit card purchases, the DOJ said when it filed the lawsuit.