Using public resources to sue companies, force them to pay for expensive defense in court, and then losing when the court decides they did nothing illegal?

Yes, that is how our justice system works. First, the government accuses you of a crime, then they have to prove that you committed it, and you get to defend yourself.

How else could it possibly work? Companies just get to break the law and no one can ever take them to court over it?

I’m not suggesting the justice system should change. I’m suggesting that civil servants who file and lose a ton of suits should be presumed to be doing net harm. Just as we would for prosecutors in criminal law.

And when it’s politically motivated, it is not just harm in the sense of economic inefficiency, but further is unjust and lowers public trust in institutions.

The problem is that what you're suggesting will eventually boil down to useless regulators. And then companies will do a plethora of suspicious things, and then you the consumer will suffer.

It's the FTC's job to do this kind of thing. If we argue it shouldn't be their job then what will we be doing? Nothing? We've tried the "do nothing" approach more times than any of us can count, and it doesn't work.

A plethora or suspicious things? If the companies are breaking the law, the FTC can sue them and win. If the companies are complying with the law, the FTC should indeed do nothing. If the law is bad, congress can pass new laws.

What's not OK is for the executive branch to not like the law, but be unsuccessful at passing new law through the democratic process, and then use the FTC to unsuccessfully sue companies in order to punish them (and threaten others) with costly legal expenses.

It's not that simple, because people don't know if they're breaking the law. The job of the FTC is to clear that up. It's a fallacy that laws can just be followed or not, almost all the time it's in a gray area.

I’m specifically talking about the situation where you lose almost all the cases. When that happens, it’s not called “clearing up the law”, it’s called frivolous lawsuits.

All law enforcement is by definition politically motivated because it is the politicians that write the laws.

I don’t necessarily disagree with your conclusion, but legislators generally don’t make prosecutorial decisions. Prosecutorial decisions are generally made after legislation is passed, by a different branch of government.

but things that do get done were definitely critically reviewed, so that's something.