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Meet the Project 2025 Co-Author Who Wants to Run the FCC If Trump Wins
Brendan Carr knows who’s calling the shots in the modern GOP, so when he’s not fawning over Trump — a prerequisite for any potential appointee — he’s busy buttering up the world’s richest internet troll: Elon Musk.
Oct 03, 2024
By now you’ve probably heard of Project 2025 — the not-so-secret plan the Heritage Foundation cooked up for the next Republican administration, complete with a 900-page authoritarian playbook for overturning civil-rights laws, gutting environmental and labor protections, criminalizing abortion, and purging the federal government of any career workers who aren’t partisan loyalists.<
Project 2025’s contents are so noxious, unpopular and anti-democratic that even Donald Trump has repeatedly tried to distance himself from them — though at least 140 former Trump officials contributed to the plan.
What you might not know is that just one of Project 2025’s authors currently works for the federal government: Brendan Carr, the senior Republican on the Federal Communications Commission.
Carr has sided with big companies and against the public interest on nearly every important issue to come before the FCC. He’s also learned what it takes to get ahead in Trumpworld: telling lies, cozying up to the far right, insisting Trump can do no wrong, sucking up to billionaires and telling more lies.
Angling to be FCC chairman in a possible Trump administration, this once mild-mannered government lawyer has gone full-on Fox News fire-breather in a despicable-if-calculated attempt to get a promotion.
Carr’s vision for the next FCC
There are serious ethical concerns about a sitting commissioner participating in Project 2025, with no clear lines as to where Carr’s government role ends and his role as a private citizen working in his “personal capacity” begins. That’s why in July a group of 16 House members called for the FCC’s inspector general to investigate whether Carr “may be misusing his official position as an executive-level employee of the FCC to craft and advance a political playbook to influence the presidential election in favor of Donald Trump.”
Commissioner Carr’s contribution to Project 2025’s “Mandate for Leadership” is wrongheaded if relatively milquetoast compared to other chapters. He rants TikTok (which is not under the FCC’s jurisdiction) and China, unwisely calls for the elimination of Section 230 of the Communications Act, and endorses ways to enrich Elon Musk’s Starlink and right-wing broadcasters like Sinclair.
He makes it clear that under a future Chairman Carr, the FCC would do the bidding of big business unencumbered by notions of serving the public interest, helping those experiencing poverty or addressing racial disparities.
In a vacuum, this wouldn’t look too different from the reliably terrible ideas and complete corporate capture of previous Republican FCC chairs.
But Project 2025 isn’t a vacuum. It’s a cesspool.
The company Carr keeps
The priorities of the Heritage Foundation, which organized Project 2025, include banning the teaching of “critical race theory” (i.e., “accurate descriptions of U.S. history”) in public schools and universities, defaming the Black Lives Matter movement, denying climate change, amplifying false claims of voter fraud and attacking transgender kids.
Project 2025’s advisory board, organizational supporters and their known associates include an array of anti-abortion zealots, anti-vaxxers, Big Liars, book banners, climate deniers, conspiracy theorists, immigrant bashers and other assorted haters.
To achieve their Christian-nationalist goals, Heritage and its allies seek to undermine democratic checks and balances in favor of a system where near-absolute power is vested in the office of a strongman president. To quote the watchdogs at the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, Project 2025 is “an authoritarian roadmap to dismantling a thriving, inclusive democracy for all.”
This is the company Carr keeps, and that alone should be reason enough to disqualify him from leading a future FCC.
But if you’re looking for more reasons, he’s providing plenty.
Fox News’ favorite commissioner
While the FCC is technically an independent agency, Carr’s binary worldview is simple: Democrats can do no right, and Trump can do no wrong.
Witness his recent appearance at a House hearing where he refused to speak out against Trump’s preposterous and dangerous suggestion that ABC should lose its broadcast licenses because its journalists tried to fact check the former president during a debate.
To be fair, fact-checking isn’t Carr’s forte. In an appearance on Fox Business’ Mornings with Maria show, the commissioner happily agreed with the host while she made numerous misleading claims — several of which originated from Carr’s Twitter feed — about the efforts of the FCC and the Biden administration to expand affordable broadband access.
While Carr wrongly claims the Biden administration has “connected no one,” the reality is that the administration’s Affordable Connectivity Program helped 1-in-6 U.S. households connect to the internet before congressional intransigence interrupted its funding.
Congress and the Biden Treasury Department also have awarded $10 billion for broadband deployment, but that’s not even half of it. A bipartisan majority in Congress committed another $42 billion to expand high-speed Internet access in every state to support infrastructure and adoption programs. Under the infrastructure law that Congress passed, each state and U.S. territory had to design a plan to receive its slice of the funds. The job of Biden’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) is to collect data, ensure state plans are in line with the law and allocate the funds to viable projects serving the communities that need it most.
Infrastructure projects like these take time, as they should given their historic nature — think rural electrification or the building of the U.S. highway system — but the benefits last far beyond a single presidential term.
For Carr and his partisan allies, the historic and popular effort underway to close the digital divide looks too much like a win for the other side, so they’ll say anything to undermine its progress. Fox — whose corporate bosses want a Republican-controlled FCC to do them special favors — is always ready to provide a platform.
Sucking up to Musk
Carr knows who’s calling the shots in the modern GOP, so when he’s not fawning over Trump — a prerequisite for any potential appointee — he’s busy buttering up the world’s richest internet troll: Elon Musk.
Carr is constantly caping for the would-be efficiency czar. At every opportunity, Carr bemoans “a campaign of regulatory harassment” the FCC is allegedly waging against Musk. The truth is that the FCC stepped in to prevent billions in taxpayer dollars from being wasted fattening Elon’s wallet while failing to get anyone better service — unless they were on a golf course or living on a highway median.
The background: During the waning days of the Trump administration, Musk’s Starlink satellite company snagged nearly $900 million in government subsidies with a promise to provide internet service to rural communities as part of a program known as the Rural Digital Opportunities Fund (RDOF).
Free Press was the first group to sound the alarm that a huge amount of taxpayer money was being wasted under RDOF to allegedly deploy internet service to uninhabited areas, big-box retail stores, airport runways and luxury resorts. Because the Trump FCC did such a shoddy job of designing the initial program, many of the beneficiaries — including Musk — were poised to cash in by promising to serve little pockets of land that already had service or where it was unlikely they’d ever sign up a single customer.
When FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel took leadership of the agency and scrutinized the plans, officials identified $2.5 billion about to be wasted on projects that didn’t meet the program’s basic requirements. So they took the money back.
I’m old enough to remember a time when Republicans claimed they cared about saving taxpayer dollars and fighting government waste. But Brendan Carr is too busy licking Musk’s cybertruck shoes to worry about his hypocrisy.
Fortunately, Carr’s record is beginning to get some attention from members of Congress — but more need to speak out about his dalliances with the far right and his trouble telling the truth. His actions and associations should disqualify him from ever serving as FCC chairman, no matter who the president is in 2025.
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To Ensure Health Equity, Congress Should Renew the Affordable Connectivity Program
As a physician delivering telemedicine-based addiction care to rural and low-income communities, the program has been the essential linchpin for creating access to lifesaving medications for opioid use disorder.
Apr 03, 2024
In an ironic twist, people recovering from opioid addiction recently gained permanently expanded access to telemedicine services through a new federal policy—but many are likely to be among the 22 million low-income households losing access to affordable internet.
The Federal Communications Commission recently began to wind down the Affordable Connectivity Program, the country’s largest, most successful internet affordability program. This government-sponsored benefit program, introduced during the pandemic, provides low-income Americans with a one-time subsidy to purchase an internet-capable device and monthly subsidies for broadband services.
As a physician delivering telemedicine-based addiction care to rural and low-income communities, the Affordable Connectivity Program has been the essential linchpin for creating telemedicine access to lifesaving medications for opioid use disorder.
I urge Congress to renew funding for the Affordable Connectivity Program and pursue legislative pathways to permanently expand internet access to all.
Substance use disorders are life-threatening chronic conditions, but they’re treatable. More than 70% of people with substance use disorders transition into recovery. However, early recovery is fragile. When people are ready to engage in care, low-barrier, rapid access to care is vitally important to support treatment success, especially during reentry from incarceration when the overdose risk is up to 129 times greater than community-based populations. Nearly half of people using opioids in rural areas were recently incarcerated, emphasizing the need for expanded rural access to treatment.
Yet, in-person addiction care is disproportionately limited in rural communities, requiring long drive times to access care. This is simply not an option for most of my patients, particularly those in early recovery. Most are trying to rebuild their lives while confronting significant financial debts incurred during past periods of expensive, prolonged substance use and incarceration. Stigma locks them out of high-earning positions, effectively segregating them to low-wage positions with limited opportunities for advancement and usually no access to benefits like paid time off to engage in care.
Many of us can get a leg up during hard times from family or peers. However, most patients in early recovery are at the starting line of repairing social relationships weakened by trust lost during active substance use and prolonged absence during incarceration. Often, the social supports they can access are facing similar resource-limited circumstances, with minimal ability or bandwidth to help with transportation or finances.
Every day, my patients choose what they can afford from a menu of necessities.
What will you have today?
- Food
- Transportation to work
- Cellphone access
- Savings toward rent
- Fees to obtain a driver’s license
Rarely can they cover more than one or two at a time. How could expensive, time-intensive travel to distant healthcare ever compete?
It shouldn’t have to. And thanks to the relaxation of telemedicine rules and the Affordable Connectivity Program, it hasn’t had to.
While the Affordable Connectivity Program’s $30 monthly subsidy sounds inconsequential, the true value of costs saved is much higher, as the collateral costs (e.g., transportation, lost-wages) of in-person services are avoided. With reliable access to data plans, my patients attend their medical appointments from their worksites during their lunch breaks or easily negotiate alternative breaks with their bosses, who are more willing to be flexible because work can quickly resume when patients remain on-site. This has allowed patients to consistently receive addiction treatment without incurring lost wages and transportation costs during the two-to-four-hour long process of in-person care. With their financial distress tempered, my patients have more quickly transitioned from survival mode to future planning.
The Affordable Connectivity Program also enabled internet access to key social resources that promote health and stability. My patients have taken online classes, searched and prepared for jobs, and built healthy social connections with online recovery communities, the latter particularly key for rural patients with limited in-person social options.
Funding for the Affordable Connectivity Program is projected to run out in April unless Congress acts quickly to renew funding. Amidst the Affordable Connectivity Program’s wind down, my team has begun switching patients to the remaining alternative telecommunication benefits for low-income households, like the Lifeline program. However, this inferior program provides only $9.95 monthly toward internet service—insufficient to cover the entire cost of a plan—and limited options of qualifying service providers. For my patients battling homelessness living in tents, cars, and motel room rentals while working tireless hours to survive and endeavor toward stable thriving, a $20 increase in monthly expenses is insurmountable.
The communities with significantly limited internet access—rural, low-income, Black—are also disproportionately impacted by the opioid crisis and low access to in-person treatment. Their precarious internet access falsely positions the internet as a luxury, rather than an essential resource for healthcare, education, employment, transportation, and social belonging. Internet access is a health equity issue.
I urge Congress to renew funding for the Affordable Connectivity Program and pursue legislative pathways to permanently expand internet access to all. Without swift action, I fear that losing the Affordable Connectivity Program will lead to more lives lost to treatable substance use disorders.
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FCC Announces New Rule to Confront Deepfake Robocalls
While welcoming the rule, one advocate said it is "not enough to safeguard citizens and our elections."
Feb 08, 2024
Just over two weeks after New Hampshire voters were inundated with artificial intelligence-generation robocalls featuring U.S. President Joe Biden's fake voice telling them not to vote in their state's primary, the Federal Communications Commission on Thursday announced what one adocate called a "desperately needed" rule declaring such calls are illegal under federal law.
The FCC unanimously voted to adopt the declaratory ruling, saying calls like those made in New Hampshire are "artificial" under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA).
The new rule goes into effect immediately, prohibiting people or groups from using voice cloning technology to create robocalls and giving state attorneys general civil enforcement authority.
According to the FCC, under the TCPA, the commission can also "take steps to block calls from telephone carriers facilitating illegal robocalls" and individual consumers or groups can bring a lawsuit against robocallers in court.
On Tuesday, the New Hampshire Department of Justice announced it had traced the robocalls from last month to a company called Life Corporation in Texas. The company made up to 25,000 of the calls.
Ishan Mehta, media and democracy program director for Common Cause, said the calls in New Hampshire last month represented "only the tip of the iceberg" and warned that "it is critically important that the FCC now use this authority to fine violators and block the telephone companies that carry the calls."
FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said that "bad actors are using AI-generated voices in unsolicited robocalls to extort vulnerable family members, imitate celebrities, and misinform voters. We're putting the fraudsters behind these robocalls on notice."
Robert Weissman, president of consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, said the rule will "meaningfully protect consumers from rapidly spreading AI scams and deception" and urged other federal agencies "follow suit and apply the tools and laws at their disposal to regulate AI."
"We need Congress to prohibit bad actors from using deceptive AI to disrupt our elections. The FEC, too, must clarify regulatory language to ban the use of deliberately deceptive AI in campaign communications."
The TCPA, however, is "not enough to safeguard citizens and our elections" from the larger threat of deepfakes and AI, warned Weissman.
"The Telephone Consumer Protection Act applies only in limited measure to election-related calls," he said. "The act's prohibition on use of 'an artificial or prerecorded voice' generally does not apply to noncommercial calls and nonprofits. So the FCC's new rule will not cure the problem of AI voice-generated calls related to elections."
Public Citizen has repeatedly demanded that the Federal Election Commission (FEC) promptly regulate deepfake images and videos, which have already been used in campaign materials by former President Donald Trump, who is running for the Republican nomination.
Last month, the FEC said a decision on deepfakes is likely several months away.
On Thursday, Nick Penniman, founder of CEO of political reform group Issue One, called the FCC's decision "a positive step" that is "not enough."
"The unregulated use of AI as a means to target, manipulate, and deceive voters is an existential threat to democracy and the integrity of our elections. This is not a future possibility, but a present reality that demands decisive action," said Penniman. "We need Congress to prohibit bad actors from using deceptive AI to disrupt our elections. The FEC, too, must clarify regulatory language to ban the use of deliberately deceptive AI in campaign communications."
"These guardrails are vital to ensure we have the necessary tools to effectively counter this growing threat," he added, "and protect our elections."
Mehta called on Congress to pass the Protect Elections from Deceptive AI Act, which would prohibit the distribution ofdeceptive AI-generated audio, images, or video relating to federal candidates in political ads.
"We hope that both the House and the Senate will follow the example of the FCC," said Mehta, "whose Democratic and Republican commissioners recognized the threat posed by AI and came together in a unanimous vote to outlaw robocalls utilizing AI voice-cloning tools."
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