President-elect Donald Trump has picked Brendan Carr, the senior Republican on the Federal Communications Commission, as the new chairman of the agency tasked with regulating broadcasting, telecommunications, and broadband.
Trump announced the nomination in a statement on Sunday night.
Carr is a longtime member of the commission and served previously as the FCC’s general counsel. He has been unanimously confirmed by the Senate three times and was nominated by both Trump and President Joe Biden to the commission.
The FCC is an independent agency that is overseen by Congress, but Trump has suggested he wanted to bring it under tighter White House control.
Carr has of late embraced Trump’s ideas about social media and tech. Carr wrote a section devoted to the FCC in “Project 2025,” a detailed proposal produced by the conservative Heritage Foundation for recommended moves in the new Trump administration
Trump has claimed he doesn’t know anything about “Project 2025,” but many of its themes have aligned with his statements.
Carr said in a statement congratulating Trump on his win that he believed “the FCC will have an important role to play reining in Big Tech, ensuring that broadcasters operate in the public interest, and unleashing economic growth.”
“Commissioner Carr is a warrior for Free Speech, and has fought against the regulatory Lawfare that has stifled Americans’ Freedoms, and held back our Economy,” Trump said in his statement on Sunday. “He will end the regulatory onslaught that has been crippling America’s Job Creators and Innovators, and ensure that the FCC delivers for rural America.”
The five-person commission has a 3-2 Democrat majority until next year, when Trump gets to appoint a new member.
Before the election, Carr slammed NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” for featuring an appearance by Trump’s Democrat opponent for the White House, Vice President Kamala Harris, on the weekend before the election because the network didn’t offer equal time to Trump.
Also a prolific writer of opinion pieces, Carr produced one for The Wall Street Journal last month decrying an FCC decision to revoke a federal award for Elon Musk’s satellite service, Starlink. He said the move couldn’t be explained “by any objective application of the facts, the law or sound policy.”
“In my view, it amounted to nothing more than regulatory lawfare against one of the left’s top targets: Mr. Musk,” Carr wrote.
