It sure looks like corporate America isn't afraid of Joe Biden anymore

• A slew of recent merger announcements suggests companies aren't afraid to test the Biden administration's antitrust agenda. 
• More than $170 billion worth of company mergers have been announced since October.
• FTC Chair Lina Khan has been vocally against big corporate deals, but recently failed to prevent Microsoft from buying Activision Blizzard.

It doesn't seem like the Biden Administration's antitrust stance is doing much to deter companies from testing the waters with a slew of mega-mergers. 

Since September, there's been a spate of merger announcements totaling more than $170 billion across different sectors, and the failure of Federal Trade Commission chief Lina Khan to stop Microsoft's blockbuster acquisition of video game publisher Activision Blizzard appears to have further opened the floodgates. 

Over the weekend it was announced that Alaskan Airlines would buy Hawaiian Airlines in a $1.9 billion deal. That follows reports last week that health insurance giants Cigna and Humana would merge in a deal worth more than $60 billion. 

The list goes on: Cisco is pursuing a $28 billion merger with cyber-security firm Splunk, Chevron announced a $59 billion deal to acquire Hess, and Exxon Mobil is attempting to buy Pioneer Natural Resources for $68 billion.

The FTC chief early on had made antitrust among tech firms in particular a focus for her agency. But there doesn't seem to be much concern among these companies, according to Wall Street analysts.

"Big tech went from fearing Kahn and the FTC to viewing them like a mosquito, and we believe there's going to be a tidal wave of M&A ahead as there's no longer worries about Kahn and the FTC stopping anything after what's been a debacle 18 months for the Kahn administration," Wedbush analyst Dan Ives told Business Insider in an interview on Monday.

More deals are especially likely if the stock market continues to move higher and interest rates move lower. Companies can use their juiced up stock price as currency to help fund potential takeovers, and lower interest rates means lower funding costs for a deal if a company funds it with debt.

A particularly brazen move

The potential Cigna-Humana deal would be a particularly brazen move, coming in an election year and in an industry that already faces plenty of scrutiny from both the public and politicians. And yet, the fact that it could be attempted at all shows just how emboldened corporations have become, despite the anti-monopoly rhetoric that's come out of Khan's FTC and the Biden White House. 

"The key factor is how Lina Khan at the FTC will view the merger," Third Bridge senior analyst George Congdon told Business Insider. "The two companies are valued at $83 billion and $60 billion respectively, which will likely draw scrutiny from hawkish regulators. Our experts were dubious as to whether Humana would be allowed to buy Cigna's Medicare Advantage business, let alone embark on a fully fledged merger," 

Alaska Airline's buy of Hawaiian Airlines is another high profile deal in an industry already plagued by issues critics say stem from a lack of competition. Alaskan Airline's CEO appears confident that the deal will be seen as a boon for customers. 

"This is definitely pro-consumer," Alaska Airlines CEO Ben Minicucci told CNBC on Monday, adding that it should expand the airline's domestic and international footprint. "We will become the bigger, stronger carrier to compete against the big four that control 80% of the domestic market share. We feel that we check both those boxes and we're hopeful that [the deal] will be seen in a positive light."

Whether Khan and her FTC, or the Department of Justice, will see it that way remains to be seen. The DOJ is currently in the middle of a lawsuit to prevent JetBlue from acquiring Spirit Airlines, and Khan has remained steadfast in her anti-trust stance during her term as Chair of the FTC, despite some high-profile setbacks. 

"We only bring lawsuits where we believe there's a law violation and where we think we can win," Khan told Bloomberg last month. And in a recent interview with DealBook, Khan defended the FTC's record under her leadership.

Khan said the FTC has levied lawsuits against 11 potential mergers, and in five of those instances the companies dropped their merger plans. She also said 14 potential mergers were dropped during the FTC's investigation periods.

The dollar value of completed mergers in the US has fallen dramatically since its peak of more than $2 trillion in 2021. So far this year, only $634 billion in merger deals have been completed, according to data from Bloomberg.

But that steep decline in deal flow since 2021 is more likely because of the surge in interest rates throughout 2022 and a stumbling stock market, and less likely to do with the intense scrutiny of Khan's FTC. 

If interest rates continue to fall and the cost of capital for companies to pursue deals declines, it's possible that corporate America will continue to challenge the Biden administration and test the waters with more M&A in 2024, as President Biden might feel pressure to toe a fine line between pro-business and anti-monopoly in his bid for re-election.