President-elect Donald Trump has nominated Brendan Carr, the senior Republican commissioner on the Federal Communications Commission, to chair the agency.
In a statement published on Sunday evening, Trump called Carr a “warrior for Free Speech” and promised he would “end the regulatory onslaught that has been crippling America’s Job Creators and Innovators, and ensure that the FCC delivers for rural America.”
A former general counsel for the agency, Carr was first nominated for a position as commissioner by Trump in 2017. He has been unanimously confirmed in the Senate three times, most recently for a new five-year term last year.
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Since he does not need to be confirmed by the Senate, Carr stands to take the reins of the agency as soon as Trump is inaugurated.
Carr has backed Trump’s calls to punish television networks for what the president-elect believes is political bias.
Mostly notably, Carr took Trump’s side in his feud with CBS News, which the incoming president sued for its “deceitful” editing of its 60 Minutes interview of Harris. In an interview with Fox Business in October, Carr said it was possible that the edited segment could be considered “distortion” and echoed Trump’s calls to release the transcript from the interview.
Carr previously outlined his vision for the agency in a chapter written for the controversial “Project 2025” agenda—a proposed conservative policy slate produced by the Heritage Foundation that Trump repeatedly disowned on the campaign trail.
Much of Carr’s contribution involves strategies to reign in Big Tech companies and reinterpret Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act—the provision that shields internet providers or platforms from lawsuits for hosting third party content.
Carr also wrote that the agency should expand rural broadband access, as well as work to promote internet access through low-earth satellite technology—including SpaceX’s Starlink and Amazon’s Project Kuiper.
Carr previously spoke out after the FCC withdrew $885 million in rural broadband subsidies for Starlink, accusing the Democratic administration of giving “federal agencies a greenlight to go after” SpaceX CEO Elon Musk after his purchase of Twitter in 2022.
He is also an outspoken opponent of net neutrality, the principle that “prohibits internet service providers from blocking, throttling, or engaging in paid prioritization of lawful content,” according to the FCC.
Former FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, the chairman during Trump’s first term in office who led the agency’s campaign to roll back net neutrality, applauded Carr’s appointment on Sunday.
“He was a brilliant advisor and General Counsel and has been a superb Commissioner, and I’m confident he will be a great FCC Chairman,” Pai said in a post on X shortly after the appointment was announced.
In his own response to the nomination, Carr promised to “dismantle the censorship cartel and restore free speech rights for everyday Americans.”
