Brendan Carr

• 1. Introduction

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  In 2019, Brendan Carr, then a commissioner at the Federal Communications Commission, said the agency has no "roving mandate to police speech in the name of the 'public interest.'" Today Carr leads that same commission. He is an American lawyer, born in 1979, whose career ran from private telecommunications practice to the agency's staff and finally to its top job. The FCC oversees broadcasters, wireless networks and much of the machinery behind the phone and internet services people use every day. So how did a lawyer known for cell towers and spectrum rules end up at the center of fights over what appears on television? What did he argue about free speech before he held the gavel, and what does he do with the agency's power now? And why have lawmakers from both parties spent recent years reacting to his letters and public remarks?

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• 2. Washington Roots

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  Brendan Thomas Carr was born on the 5th of January 1979 in Washington, D.C. His mother, Barbara, was a clinical psychologist. His father, Thomas, was a defense lawyer who once represented President Richard Nixon. Carr grew up in McLean, Virginia.

  From fourth grade on, Carr attended the Potomac School, where he played goalie on the varsity soccer team in his junior and senior years. Bloomberg News later described him on the field as a "zealously competitive team player" and noted his "unruly behavior."

  College began with a single year at James Madison University. Carr then moved to Georgetown University and graduated in 2001 with a Bachelor of Arts in government, plus a minor in history and anthropology. He spent the following year as a paralegal at a firm near the office of Bob Beizer, who led the Federal Communications Bar Association and knew Carr's father.

  Beizer gave Carr a pointed piece of advice. He should attend the Columbus School of Law at the Catholic University of America and earn a telecommunications certificate. Carr followed it and graduated in 2005 with a Juris Doctor, magna cum laude. Carr is a Republican and a Catholic. After his first year of law school, he interned in the spectrum-enforcement division of the Federal Communications Commission, his first taste of the agency he would later lead.

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• 3. Climbing to the Commission

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  Wiley Rein, a law firm, was Carr's first employer after law school, and his clients there included Verizon and AT&T. From 2008 to 2009 he briefly served as a law clerk to Dennis Shedd, a judge on the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. In 2012 he joined the FCC as an attorney in the Office of General Counsel.

  A turning point came in 2014, when Carr became an advisor to commissioner Ajit Pai. When Pai became chair in January 2017, he appointed Carr as the commission's general counsel. Carr also married Machalagh Carr, a former oversight staff director on the House Committee on Ways and Means. They have two children.

  In May 2017, Politico Pro reported that Carr was among several candidates for the seat once held by Tom Wheeler. President Donald Trump nominated him on the 28th of June. At a Senate hearing the following month, Carr defended his independence against questions about his closeness to Pai. The Senate Commerce Committee advanced his nomination on the 2nd of August, though Democrats objected to a five-year continuation of his term. The full Senate confirmed him by voice vote the next day. That December he voted to repeal the net neutrality rules.

  That first confirmation only covered the rest of Wheeler's term. His nomination for a full five-year term lapsed in January 2018, which forced a second fight. Democrats wanted to pair his reconfirmation with a successor to Mignon Clyburn, who was widely expected to retire. On the 18th of January, the Commerce Committee advanced him in a 14-13 party-line vote, with Democrats citing his net neutrality vote.

  Then came the holds. West Virginia senator Joe Manchin stalled the nomination over exempted rural broadband subsidies in the Mobility Fund. Alaska senators Dan Sullivan and Lisa Murkowski objected over an Alaskan telecommunications company's exclusion from rural health subsidies. The Senate finally confirmed Carr on the 3rd of January 2019, in the middle of a government shutdown that had furloughed most FCC employees.

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• 4. 5G and Beijing

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  At a regulatory summit in Brussels in February 2018, Carr laid out a three-step process to prepare regulators for 5G. Later that month he discussed speeding up the historic and environmental reviews that apply to new network construction. City officials objected, as did Native American tribes, whose role in those reviews the plan would have erased, and Democrats joined them. Telecommunications companies, including Sprint and AT&T, praised it. The FCC approved the plan in September.

  In July of that year, Carr proposed a telehealth fund for low-income Americans. The commission unanimously approved it the following month as an extension of the Universal Service Fund. In March 2021, he announced a blueprint for the FCC to follow on 5G. Delays in President Joe Biden's nominations let the FCC keep a Republican majority. His 5G push met resistance from the Biden administration, producing a public clash between Carr and administration officials, including the president.

  Carr's views on business were consistent with that agenda. He told Politico Pro's Margaret Harding McGill that net neutrality rules were unnecessary. He voted to repeal a rule requiring broadcast stations to keep a physical studio in each coverage area. He called an internal plan from the first Trump administration to nationalize 5G construction "China-like nationalization." He opposed transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg's efforts to delay 5G rollouts over flight-safety worries, and he approved the merger of Sprint and T-Mobile US.

  China shaped his rhetoric as much as 5G did. When China Mobile sought access to the American market, Carr urged that its application be denied and that China Unicom and China Telecom be examined. He led an effort to withhold authorization from Chinese manufacturers, including Huawei and ZTE, over alleged national security concerns. At a meeting on broadband subsidies, he warned that cell towers in Montana's missile fields were "running on Huawei equipment."

  He also sought to put the drone maker DJI on the Covered List, calling a Washington Post report that it accepted Chinese state funding "deeply concerning." During the COVID-19 pandemic, he began calling out Chinese officials directly on social media. The Post described him as TikTok's "loudest media critic." In June 2022, after BuzzFeed News reported that TikTok employees in China had apparently accessed American users' data, he asked Apple and Google to remove the app from their stores.

  SpaceX's Starlink would soon become a central subject in his career. Carr dissented in a vote to revoke Starlink's rural broadband subsidies.

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• 5. Project 2025 and Speech

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  In September 2022, a policy advisor to Ajit Pai introduced Carr to Wesley Coopersmith, chief of staff to Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts. Coopersmith described a project to remake the federal government along conservative lines, later known as Project 2025. He sent Carr the first and seventh editions of the foundation's Mandate for Leadership. Carr said he wanted to contribute.

  Political activity by a federal official can raise legal questions. An FCC ethics lawyer concluded that Carr would not violate the Hatch Act, but she warned him to distance the work from his FCC role. Carr wrote several pages on telecommunications and technology regulation. They called for regulating technology companies, imposing transparency rules and ending Section 230.

  Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act had already become his signature issue. Before the pandemic, Carr had begun drifting from Pai philosophically, and he focused on reforming that law. He backed Trump's "Executive Order on Preventing Online Censorship," which targeted Section 230. In October 2020, he offered a conservative case for reinterpreting the law, saying Pai could do so. The Wall Street Journal's editorial board, the Heritage Foundation, and senators Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz later took up those arguments.

  On speech, Carr sometimes defended private companies and sometimes attacked them. He criticized Mark Zuckerberg's Washington Post column calling for government regulation of harmful online material, arguing that it would violate the First Amendment. He later praised Zuckerberg's "instincts" in leaving Trump's COVID-19 posts unaltered. When House Democrats on the Energy and Commerce Committee pressed cable providers about election misinformation, he called their letter a "chilling transgression" of free speech.

  He called free speech the "bedrock of democracy." He described political censorship as a "tool that those in power use to suppress any challenge to their positions or orthodoxy." He praised political satire as a way to criticize the powerful. In July 2021, he appeared with Florida governor Ron DeSantis to urge Biden to offer internet service to Cubans, a step that allegedly would violate international law.

  In December 2024, Carr wrote to Disney chief executive Bob Iger, claiming that "Americans no longer trust the national news media to report fully, accurately, and fairly." When Trump named him chair, Carr vowed to "dismantle the censorship cartel and restore free speech rights."

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• 6. First Year as Chair

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  As early as 2020, observers saw Carr as a possible successor to Ajit Pai. After Trump won the 2024 election, he was widely expected to get the job. According to The New York Times, Elon Musk privately backed him and had a good relationship with him. On the 17th of November 2024, Trump named Carr as his pick for chair. Carr said he wanted to extend the FCC's mandate to social media companies.

  Carr took charge after Trump's second inauguration on the 20th of January 2025, though the commission lacked a Republican majority until Olivia Trusty's confirmation. That month he ordered an investigation of NPR and PBS sponsorships as possible violations of commercial advertising rules. He said he did not think Congress should keep funding either organization. The next day he requested a transcript of Kamala Harris's 60 Minutes interview, which the FCC released in February.

  Also in February, Carr reopened a complaint against WPVI-TV over ABC's moderation of the September 2024 debate between Trump and Harris. His predecessor, Jessica Rosenworcel, had dismissed it. He accused NBC of trying to "evade" the equal-time rule when Harris appeared on the final Saturday Night Live episode before the election. Carr signaled that the FCC would use its bully pulpit against opponents of Trump's ideology.

  His relationship with Musk shaped other decisions. Carr awarded SpaceX federal radio spectrum. He opened an investigation into EchoStar over its 5G deployment requirements and threatened to give its satellite spectrum to SpaceX instead. In response to the inquiry, EchoStar stopped making interest payments. In April, he urged European countries to sign contracts with SpaceX rather than Chinese competitors.

  In March 2025, he launched an initiative called "Delete, Delete, Delete" to eliminate existing telecom rules. He used Direct Final Rule to remove regulations without the full public comment period. He eliminated a proposal that would have barred landlords from forcing bulk internet service on residents. He also publicly questioned the Global Positioning System and sought alternatives.

  Diversity, equity, and inclusion policies became his main leverage over mergers. In February he ordered investigations into DEI practices at Comcast and into KCBS over its coverage of immigration actions in San Jose, California. Commissioner Geoffrey Starks told ABC News that the DEI probes exceeded the FCC's statutory authority. Paramount Global, with a merger pending before the commission, ended its DEI policies. In March, Carr told Bloomberg News he would block any merger involving companies with DEI policies.

  The following week he opened an investigation of The Walt Disney Company over its DEI policies and threatened to revoke ABC's broadcast license. After a complaint from Great American Media, he wrote to Google chief executive Sundar Pichai and YouTube executive Neal Mohan, asking whether YouTube TV engaged in "faith-based discrimination." T-Mobile closed its Lumos Networks joint venture after agreeing to end its DEI policies. The FCC approved Verizon's acquisition of Frontier Communications in May after Verizon promised to end its DEI practices.

  Trusty's confirmation in June 2025 restored the FCC's quorum and gave Republicans a majority. Carr moved to end net neutrality, although a federal appellate court had already struck the rules down. He declined to enforce a rule that would have lowered prison phone call prices. In October, Trusty and Carr voted to reduce the limit, though their proposed limit was higher than the one set the previous year.

  In July, the commission approved the merger of Paramount Global and Skydance Media. Skydance promised that the combined Paramount Skydance would have no DEI policies and would install an ombudsman to ensure a "diversity of viewpoints." Carr told CNBC that CBS's cancellation of The Late Show helped the company comply with regulations. That month, the Freedom of the Press Foundation filed an ethics complaint over his role in the deal. Carr said Skydance's promise to eliminate bias "made the difference."

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• 7. The Kimmel Episode

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  On a podcast hosted by the right-wing commentator Benny Johnson in September 2025, Carr said the FCC "can do this the easy way or the hard way." He was discussing remarks that Jimmy Kimmel made on his ABC show about the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Carr added that "companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there's going to be additional work for the FCC ahead." He encouraged local stations to preempt the show.

  Nexstar Media Group, the largest television station owner in the United States, soon said it would not air Jimmy Kimmel Live! "for the foreseeable future." Nexstar was in the middle of acquiring Tegna, the fourth-largest broadcaster, a deal that needed FCC approval. The company later denied that Carr's comments influenced its decision. Hours later, ABC announced it was pulling the show indefinitely. The Wall Street Journal reported that Bob Iger and Dana Walden, co-chairman of Disney Entertainment, made that decision.

  The reaction was swift. House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, joined by Katherine Clark and Pete Aguilar, denounced Carr and called for his resignation. Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer also demanded his resignation. He and ten Senate Democrats sent Carr a letter demanding answers about what his remarks meant for broadcasters.

  Criticism also came from Carr's own party. Kentucky senator Rand Paul expressed concern. Texas senator Ted Cruz chairs the Commerce Committee that oversees the FCC, and he compared Carr's statements to mafia tactics. He called the threats "dangerous as hell." Trump took the opposite view and praised Carr as a "great American patriot," pointing to what he called overwhelmingly negative coverage of his presidency.

  Carr defended the position as a matter of public-interest duty. He said public broadcasters should serve the public interest and that local stations had "every right under the law in their contracts to preempt" programming that did not. He said the United States was "in the midst of a massive shift in dynamics in the media ecosystem." Kimmel's show returned the following week.

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• 8. The Equal-Time Campaign

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  After the Kimmel suspension, Carr turned to the equal-time rule, which governs how broadcasters treat political candidates. In September 2025, he named the daytime talk show The View as a possible target. In February 2026, Reuters reported that he had opened an investigation into the program after it interviewed Texas state senator James Talarico, a candidate in the Texas Senate election.

  In November 2025, Carr reposted a message from Trump urging NBC to fire late-night host Seth Meyers over his critical comedy. That month he also wrote to the chief executives of the BBC, PBS and NPR. He asked whether a Trump speech before the January 6 Capitol attack had been deceptively edited. The BBC had faced accusations of systemic bias over its coverage of the speech, and resignations followed.

  In January 2026, Carr issued a notice on how the equal-time rule applies to television morning and late-night talk shows. Commissioner Anna Gomez said it advanced his "ongoing campaign to censor and control speech." Carr also said the same guidance would not apply to talk radio. In February, Stephen Colbert accused CBS's lawyers of blocking him from interviewing Talarico because they feared Carr would target the network. Carr dismissed that concern as a "hoax." Some media law experts and political operatives worried the rule would deter candidates from appearing in the 2026 elections.

  Carr's own view of the agency has shifted over time. At an April 2025 meeting with Georgia representative Buddy Carter, he wore a gold lapel pin bearing Trump's face, which many saw as a signal of loyalty. In December, he told the Senate Commerce Committee that the Federal Communications Commission was not an independent agency of the federal government.

  In March 2026, Carr threatened to revoke the licenses of television stations "running hoaxes and news distortions" about the Iran war. He reposted a Truth Social message from Trump calling a Wall Street Journal headline about an Iranian airstrike "intentionally misleading." That same month he voted to approve the Nexstar and Tegna merger. He also sought public comment on a proposed policy to apply television ratings to material involving transgender issues.

  He also began a review of Disney's broadcast licenses. The stated basis was diversity, equity, and inclusion policies at ABC News. Reports said the review moved faster after Kimmel made jokes at the expense of Trump and his wife, Melania.

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