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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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Trump's FCC Ripped Away Open-Internet Protections. We're This Close to Winning Them Back
A majority of commissioners is set to return to the agency the authority it needs to act as a strong advocate for a user-powered internet.
Apr 22, 2024
Later this week, the Federal Communications Commission is expected to reverse a Trump-era decision that stripped away essential open-internet protections. In a Thursday vote, a majority of commissioners will return to the agency the authority it needs to act as a strong advocate for a user-powered internet.
They will do this by reclassifying broadband-access services as telecom services subject to Title II of the Communications Act. Title II authority allows the FCC to safeguard Net Neutrality and hold companies like AT&T, Comcast and Verizon accountable to internet users across the United States.
Title II authority gives the FCC the tools to make the internet work better for everyone, ensuring that internet service providers can’t block, throttle, or otherwise discriminate against the content everyone accesses online. But it also gives the FCC the regulatory means to ensure that broadband prices and practices are “just and reasonable.” The agency will be able to step in to stop price gouging, safeguard user privacy, protect public safety, eliminate junk fees, and stop other abusive behavior from providers.
During a Capitol Hill press conference last week, FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said, “There are a lot of things in this country that divide us, but Net Neutrality is not one of them.” Rosenworcel cited poll after poll that show that people across the political spectrum overwhelmingly support the 2015 Title II Net Neutrality safeguards that the Obama FCC put in place. The same polls show majorities opposed the Trump FCC’s 2017 repeal of these protections.
“Bringing back the FCC’s authority over broadband and putting back net neutrality rules is popular, and it has been court-tested and court-approved,” she added. “[W]e have an opportunity to get this right. Because in a modern digital economy, it is time to have broadband oversight, national Net Neutrality rules, and policies that ensure the internet is fast, open, and fair.”
Back to the future
The rules up for a vote on April 25 are identical to the 2015 rules. The FCC will enforce them in the same way. And the draft order text that the agency will finalize and adopt already makes this clear — in some cases, going further than the 2015 order did — with a chance before the vote occurs for the FCC to make this language even stronger.
Losing Title II hurt people, which is why millions protested the Trump FCC’s action. Not only did its 2017 repeal gut the Net Neutrality rules, it also surrendered the agency’s power to protect communities from unjust or unreasonable practices by these internet-access goliaths.
This had troubling consequences during the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic, when Trump FCC Chairman Ajit Pai asked broadband providers to sign a
voluntary pledge to preserve people’s vital internet access (he couldn’t force providers to do this since he’d abdicated the agency’s authority to compel these companies to keep users connected). Despite Pai’s claim that the pledge was a success, reporting by Daily Dot found that many of these same companies still cut users’ connections during a national emergency, when everything from work to health care had shifted online.
A 2019 study by Northeastern University and UMass Amherst found that ISP throttling of network services happens “all the time.” Researchers analyzed data from hundreds of thousands of smartphones to determine whether wireless providers were slowing, or throttling, data speeds for specific mobile services. They found that “just about every wireless carrier is guilty of throttling video platforms and streaming services unevenly.”
In everyday terms, this means that companies like AT&T are picking winners and losers online. Allowing such throttling to continue opens the door to more content-based discrimination. This isn’t just about economic favoritism — for example, an ISP slowing down a competitor’s online app so people would use their product instead — but, potentially, the blocking of political messages that gigantic communications companies don’t like.
This isn’t a hypothetical. In 2005, the internet service provider Telus blocked access to a server that hosted a website supporting a labor strike against the company. And in 2011, the Electronic Frontier Foundation found that several ISPs were intercepting user search queries on Bing and Yahoo and directing them to “results” pages that they or their partners controlled.
The say-anything lobbyists
Lobbyists working for these large internet-access companies like to say that Title II authority offers “a solution in search of a problem” that doesn’t exist. And you can bet they’ll repeat
a lot of these lies in the aftermath of this week’s vote.
Throughout the 20 years of debate around Title II and Net Neutrality, the powerful phone and cable lobby has demonstrated a willingness to say anything and everything to avoid being held accountable. They’ll say that Title II’s open-internet standard is a heavy-handed regulation that will undermine investment in new broadband deployment; in reality, executives from these companies have said publicly that their capital expenditures
aren’t impacted in any way by Title II rules. The lobbyists will say that Net Neutrality is a hyper-partisan, politicized issue — ignoring public polling (see above) that shows internet users on the political left, right, and center overwhelmingly support the sorts of baseline protections offered under Title II.
The fight for this week’s victory predates the Trump FCC repeal of strong Title II rules in 2017. By restoring safeguards that millions fought so hard to make a reality, the FCC is recognizing the broad-based grassroots movement that coalesced in 2005 around the then-obscure principle of Net Neutrality and built a movement focused on retaining the people-powered, democratic spirit that was baked into the internet at its inception.
Without baseline open-internet protections, internet users are subject to privacy invasions, hidden junk fees, data caps, and billing rip-offs from their ISPs. In addition, without Title II oversight the FCC is severely limited in its ability to promote broadband competition and deployment, bringing this essential infrastructure within reach of people in the United States who lack access.
The FCC will change all of that later this week. It will respond to overwhelming public opinion and stand up for internet users against a handful of monopoly-minded companies that for too long have dictated media policy in Washington.
Come Thursday, I and many of the amazing advocates who’ve been fighting this fight for the past 20 years will be on hand at the FCC to witness the final vote. It will be a moment to appreciate our hard work and thank the agency for restoring to Americans their all-important online rights. Join us in celebrating!
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A Dirty Campaign Defeated Gigi Sohn. We Can't Let it Happen Again.
The failure of Democratic senators to advocate for their own nominee means that companies like Comcast and Fox will likely only double-down in the future on the kinds of deceitful tactics they deployed against a nominee who would have been an incredible addition to the FCC.
Mar 08, 2023
On Tuesday, Gigi Sohn withdrew her nomination to the Federal Communications Commission.
This ends a two-year fight to put an accomplished public servant in the important fifth seat on the FCC. In the —after nearly 500 days, multiple confirmation hearings, and a relentless industry-orchestrated campaign against her—Sohn didn't have enough votes in the Senate to move forward.
I'm furious—and determined to make sure this doesn't happen again.
The dirty campaign to stop Gigi Sohn
They're celebrating today at Comcast and Fox, where their lobbyists deserve most of the credit for concocting lies to derail Sohn's nomination. They falsely portrayed her as radical and divisive, even though her years of experience tell a different story—about a highly regarded expert who has reached across political divides to support communications policies that help people.
Republicans who willfully spread those lies are thrilled, too. Their campaign of vile dog whistles, homophobic innuendo and false outrage worked. In fact, it was too easy.
But they're not the only ones to blame: The failure of Democratic leaders to defend their nominee cost the agency—and the nation—a true public servant. Their missteps and unforced errors were many.
From the start, infighting in the Biden administration delayed the nomination of a new FCC chair and commissioner for months—meaning Sohn wasn't nominated until late October 2021 and then got little time during debates around the infrastructure bills. Instead of moving on this nomination right away when the Biden team had the most political capital—they did it when they had the least.
While the GOP ganged up on her, most Democrats sat back, either using their time on the dais to ask questions about their home states or repeat industry-written talking points.
Then Senate leaders made Sohn endure an unprecedented three confirmation hearings, giving the right-wing noise machine numerous opportunities to badger her while extracting zero concessions from the other side. Despite her composure in the hot seat, this stage let Sohn's opponents test out numerous lines of attack. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) got endless opportunities to fulminate about her random retweets, while Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) cosplayed as a culture warrior from his new perch on the Commerce Committee.
While the GOP ganged up on her, most Democrats sat back, either using their time on the dais to ask questions about their home states or repeat industry-written talking points. (Notable and laudable exceptions who came to Sohn's defense include Sens. Ed Markey and Tammy Baldwin.)
Unfortunately, the failure of more Democratic senators to advocate for their own nominee means that companies like Comcast and Fox will likely only double-down in the future on the kinds of deceitful and dirty tactics they deployed against Sohn. What other lessons could they draw from how easily senators folded in the face of easily fact-checked lies and slanders? And what potential FCC nominee would want to subject themselves to this kind of character assassination?
A leadership failure
Neither the White House nor Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer succeeded in getting the votes Sohn needed when she got through committee and to the verge of a floor vote last year. They didn't put enough pressure on holdout senators or create any real political costs for the holdouts' refusal to back the administration's nominees. Worse still, President Biden and Vice President Harris actually feted ISP execs in the Rose Garden—even as those same companies were sabotaging Sohn.
It says a lot about who they're willing to fight for—and who they won't.
Without real pressure from the top, rank-and-file Democrats invented excuses for why they couldn't vote before the midterms—and, once those were over, immediately recycled the same rationalizations about the 2024 election. As much as I might wish the FCC were a top-tier election issue, exactly zero swing voters are going to the polls thinking about Gigi Sohn. Yet multiple senators acted like a vote for their own party's nominee could sink their reelection chances.
Politicians who should know better all of a sudden took seriously the disingenuous pay-to-slay attacks by sock-puppet front groups (including one led by former North Dakota Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, now on the corporate payroll). I'm not sure what's worse: If they just made these excuses to placate corporate donors, or if they actually believed them.
What does it say when Democratic senators—like Sens. Cortez-Masto, Kelly, Rosen, and Tester, who all failed publicly support Sohn—take the specious claims of a disreputable group like the Fraternal Order of Police more seriously than they do the support of 400 of the nation's largest civil-rights, civil-liberties, labor and public-interest groups? What does it mean when they don't just let the lies fester but actually promote them? It says a lot about who they're willing to fight for—and who they won't.
The next battle
This defeat has implications that go far beyond the FCC. The Republicans and their Democratic enablers are setting out markers for who's allowed to serve in government. They made clear that public servants will be pilloried while ex-corporate lobbyists sail through. Women and LGBTQIA+ folks—Sohn would have been the first lesbian to serve as an FCC commissioner—will be slandered. Tweeting about police violence can be disqualifying (in the Senate, retweets do equal endorsements). Questioning the propriety of Fox News—even as it's being exposed for aiding and abetting election lies and insurrection—is unacceptable. A basic understanding of U.S. history and racism may be disqualifying.
Of course, this is bad news for the FCC, too.
At a moment when media and tech are intertwined with every facet of our lives, our politics and the very state of our democracy, this vital agency cannot fully do its job. Which is just how the industry wants it.
One of the best things the Biden administration has done since 2021 is securing $65 billion for broadband expansion. FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel has been making the most of the hand she was dealt, but a deadlocked FCC makes it harder to implement and maintain those programs and spend those funds in the best way possible. Net Neutrality and the restoration of Title II will remain in limbo without a fifth vote at the agency. As Sohn herself wrote in the statement announcing her withdrawal: "It means that the FCC will not have a majority to adopt strong rules which ensure that everyone has nondiscriminatory access to broadband, regardless of who they are or where they live."
At a moment when media and tech are intertwined with every facet of our lives, our politics and the very state of our democracy, this vital agency cannot fully do its job. Which is just how the industry wants it.
The next test is already here. The Biden administration needs to come up with a new nominee to the FCC, and it may be tempted to nominate an industry-friendly choice—someone who can "get through" and avoid a larger political fight. We must oppose and reject any return to business as usual that furthers industry capture of the FCC.
Instead, we need to demand an independent candidate with public-interest bona fides and a clear commitment to racial justice and civil rights. They must show they're willing to stand up to lies. They must be unequivocal in their support for restoring the FCC's authority, and making sure that the internet is open, affordable, available, and reliable for everyone. They must demonstrate a commitment to engaging the public, not just meeting with lobbyists.
This loss stings. Gigi Sohn deserved better. But we cannot let the industry pick its own regulators ever again.
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