WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald Trump announced on Sunday that he selected Brendan Carr to serve as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission.
Carr currently serves as the top Republican commissioner on the FCC, the government agency tasked with regulating radio, television and cable communications.
“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 announcing his selection of Carr. “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.”
Carr authored the FCC chapter in the conservative playbook Project 2025, in which he argued that the agency’s main goals should be “reining in Big Tech, promoting national security, unleashing economic prosperity, and ensuring FCC accountability and good governance.”
In his chapter, Carr suggested TikTok should be banned if it fails to disentangle from its China-based parent company — an issue on which Trump has held conflicting views before joining the app himself earlier this year. He also called for working with Congress to reform Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which gives social media companies a level of immunity for the content on their platforms and allows them to moderate certain objectionable content “in good faith.”
“Congress should do so by ensuring that Internet companies no longer have carte blanche to censor protected speech while maintaining their Section 230 protections,” Carr wrote in Project 2025’s book.
FCC leadership is comprised of five commissioners serving five-year terms, and only three commissioners are allowed to be from the same party, meaning the agency is bipartisan.
Jillian Frankel contributed.
