Brendan Carr, one of two Federal Communications Commission (FCC) commissioners Donald Trump appointed who is still in office, has long been one of the most vocal opponents of President Joe Biden’s initiatives, such as the $42 billion Broadband Equity Access and Deployment (BEAD) program, which is an “absolute failure,” he told the Washington Reporter. “Not a single person has been connected to the internet through that initiative,” he lamented.

Carr, a longtime telecommunications professional, has been an FCC commissioner since 2017. In that time, he’s gone through policy fights on net neutrality, a potential TikTok ban, quests for more spectrum, and more. 

The agency’s priorities have changed drastically between the Trump and Biden administrations, Carr said: while “the FCC’s number one job has to be ending the digital divide, making sure that Americans, regardless of their zip code, have access to robust, affordable, next generation connectivity,” the Biden administration has other priorities in mind.

“The FCC has said that its second highest priority is to promote DEI,” Carr said. “I have no idea how promoting DEI should be in the top anything of the Federal Communication Commission’s priorities, let alone its second highest priority.” Carr would rather get “back to bread and butter, more spectrum, more infrastructure reform, and get people connected and stop getting distracted with ideological goals that have nothing to do with what we should be delivering on as an agency.”

Democrats are wrapped around the “DEI axle,” he added, which hiders the agency’s efficacy. In “the Trump years we freed up over 6,000 megahertz of spectrum,” he said, whereas the Biden administration recently “issued a spectrum strategy, long-delayed, where they committed to freeing up exactly zero megahertz of spectrum and only studying 2,000 megahertz.”

Vice President Kamala Harris, who was made America’s de facto-rural broadband czar in 2021, has added to the failures. “By my count, this program being led by Vice President Harris is the single slowest moving broadband initiative in history,” Carr said. “Under Vice President Harris’s leadership, we’ve been leaving family members and communities stuck on the wrong side of the digital divide with no connection needlessly, while all these other DEI, climate change, price control rules are getting put in place.”

Carr also noted that the Biden administration has been harsh on Elon Musk’s Starlink program. “Last year after President Biden stood at the podium and said that Elon Musk is worth going after, worth looking at, the FCC revoked that award, and we replaced it, in most cases with nothing, the $42 billion program, or we’re spending dollars on the penny of taxpayer money. I mean, it’s not good,” the commissioner said. Carr, who recently met with Musk, vociferously opposed the decision. 

The Biden administration’s harassment of Musk and his business empire goes well beyond Starlink, Carr said. “We have seen an unprecedented surge in regulatory harassment of both him and his businesses,” he said. “FAA has been going after him. DOJ, Southern District of New York, even the Fish and Wildlife Services they were wondering whether they should open an investigation because one of the launches from one of his rocket launches, they claimed it charred some bobwhite quail eggs in Blue landcraft. To me, that sounds more like surf and turf than a federal investigation.”

Carr is concerned that the government won’t stop its weaponization with Musk. 

Biden’s administration has opened numerous investigations into Musk’s business empire, leading to an “unprecedented surge in regulatory harassment,” Carr said. “Once the government starts to head down the path of weaponization, it doesn’t just focus on one individual. Once a government crosses a line into weaponization, it’s rare that you see it stop, and we haven’t seen it stop. Just everyday people, trying to express their free speech rights, have been effectively censored by the government through pressure that was applied to Elon Musk.”

Carr is also concerned about the growing expansion of surveillance from the Chinese Communist Party, via companies such as TikTok and DJI.

“When someone tells you where they stand on censorship, they’re telling you just about every single thing that you need to know about their approach to government power,” he said.

Below is a transcript of our interview with FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr, lightly edited for clarity.

Washington Reporter:
Commissioner Carr, thanks so much for talking with us today. We recently interviewed Sean Cooksey, who chairs the FEC. You’re the senior most Republican commissioner on the FCC. What are your top priorities, and how has your ability to execute on them has shifted between the Trump and Biden administrations?

FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr:
The FCC’s number one job has to be ending the digital divide, making sure that Americans, regardless of their zip code, have access to robust, affordable, next generation connectivity. And there’s always been a two-part playbook for doing that, which is pushing more spectrum out there, the airwaves that power wireless connections, and modernizing infrastructure rules, effectively permitting reform. And we made really good progress on both of those fronts during the Trump administration, and things have gone entirely off the rails under the Biden-Harris administration. On the spectrum front alone, we freed up over 6,000 megahertz of spectrum during the Trump years, and that allowed us to leapfrog our global counterparts in terms of connectivity. The Biden-Harris administration, not that long ago, issued a spectrum strategy, long-delayed, where they committed to freeing up exactly zero megahertz of spectrum and only studying 2,000 megahertz. In the Trump years we freed up over 6,000 megahertz of spectrum. The Biden administration is only going to study and effectively kick the can down the road on 2,000 megahertz. That’s just simply not getting the job done. And the same thing on permitting side. The federal government has freed up billions and billions of dollars to be used on various infrastructure projects, but they’re not streamlining permitting. And so that’s like jumping on the gas and the brakes at the same time, that’s why you just see so little progress right now across the country in terms of bridging the digital divide. Fundamentally, I think Democrats are having a very hard time actually building things. And one of the core reasons is I think they’ve gotten wrapped around the DEI axle. For instance, the FCC’s own strategic plan lays out its principal goals, and the FCC has said that its second highest priority is to promote DEI. I have no idea how promoting DEI should be in the top anything of the Federal Communication Commission’s priorities, let alone its second highest priority. So we have to just get back to bread and butter, more spectrum, more infrastructure reform and get people connected and stop getting distracted with ideological goals that have nothing to do with what we should be delivering on as an agency. 

Washington Reporter:
One of the attempts by the Biden administration is to expand rural broadband through the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment (BEAD) program. What should Congress be doing about either shuttering this program or forcing it to actually do broadband in rural areas?

FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr:
This is a real microcosm for something that we’re seeing across government right now. So back in 2021, President Biden asked Vice President Harris to lead the administration’s signature $42 billion plan to extend internet to millions of Americans, and it’s now been over 1,000 days since that plan was signed into law, and as of today, not a single person has been connected to the internet through that initiative. The administration says that not a single person will be connected to the internet this year through that program, and they’re hopeful that there’ll be at least a handful of projects that are underway at some point next year, 2025, but that analysis is showing the vast majority of projects won’t even get underway until 2026. This is just an absolute failure, the $42 billion program that Vice President Harris was tapped with leading has gone completely off the rails. They haven’t connected anybody. They have spent time doing other things. For instance, they’ve adopted regulations that promote DEI, they’ve adopted regulations that advance a climate change agenda. They put in place price controls, so that if you ever do get this bill, they have rate regulation on the services that you can get from that, and other sort of just partisan, ideological goals. And the upshot here is that under Vice President Harris’s leadership, we’ve been leaving family members and communities stuck on the wrong side of the digital divide with no connection needlessly, while all these other DEI, climate change, price control rules are getting put in place. We have an opportunity, though, to get this $42 billion initiative back on track. Get rid of the DEI requirements, get rid of the climate change agenda, get rid of the price controls, and just get back to focusing on turning dirt and getting people connected. The other piece is that the Biden-Harris administration has been giving basically the short shrift to a technology that can quickly do this, which is low earth orbit satellites. Elon Musk’s Starlink is probably the best example of a technology that would have allowed us to connect all those people by now, if the administration had been more open-minded to using someone that they view as aggressive enemy number one. 

Washington Reporter:
What has the Biden-Harris administration said as its explanation to you or to others about how this program has done nothing?

FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr:
What’s interesting is that what they’ve said so far, in response to calling out the fact that it’s been over 1,000 days and no one’s been connected, is a couple of things: One, they said, ‘well, we’re just following the processes that were set by the law that Congress passed.’ Well, that’s not true for two reasons. One, this was a piece of legislation that was advocated for by President Biden, that it was Democrats that got this legislation across the finish line. So to somehow blame the legislation doesn’t make any sense. The other thing that they say is that ‘nobody wants us to sort of just throw this money across the transom without waste, fraud, abuse protection.’ And, of course, that’s a strawman argument. There’s a big difference between shoveling the money out the door on day one and continuing to sit on it on day 1,017. The fact is, we have other significant broadband initiatives that we’ve been running in prior years and are running right now that both have waste, fraud, and abuse protections and get dirt turning much, much faster. By my count, this program being led by Vice President Harris, is the single slowest moving broadband initiative in history. The other piece here is that the Biden administration itself put new requirements out of this program that weren’t found in the law. So the law was, in essence, ‘here’s 42 billion, some guardrails in place. Get this out the door.’ And the Biden administration came in and layered on through administrative state regulations, additional processes and hoops, again, that were found nowhere in the law. So there hasn’t been any real significant defense of the delay. But at the same time, there’s been very little accountability. No one’s been fired for leaving Americans stuck on the wrong side of the digital divide, but we should have some accountability for what’s taking place. But again, stepping back, back in 2020 we secured a deal with Elon Musk’s Starlink to provide high speed internet service to over 600,000 Americans that were unconnected across 30-plus different states, and the deal that we got was to have that service available, accessible for about $1,300 just over $1,000, $1,300 in federal support per location that they made the service available at. And you flash forward now in the Biden administration, there are programs, not the $42 billion one, but there are programs that they’re spending money on right now to connect people to the internet. They’re spending orders of magnitude more money than $1,300 in fact, in some cases, they’re spending over $100,000 per location to get people connected to the internet. It is absolutely spending dollars on the penny. So again, we had a deal with Starlink for $1,300 in federal support per location to get Americans connected. Last year after President Biden stood at the podium and said that Elon Musk is worth going after, worth looking at, the FCC revoked that award, and we replaced it, in most cases with nothing, the $42 billion program, or we’re spending dollars on the penny of taxpayer money. I mean, it’s not good. 

Washington Reporter:
Do you see the failures you’re talking about as hallmarks of broader incompetence by this administration, like how we saw billions of dollars of military equipment stranded in Afghanistan?

FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr:
I think they’re all connected. I think there’d be different explanations, but I think one common thread is that this is an administration that is totally wrapped around the DEI axle in whatever we’re supposed to be doing, rather than prioritizing that mission, of that agency, of that program, we are off pursuing these partisan, ideological goals. Look at the FCC with its second-highest priority being to promote DEI, this $42 billion BEAD initiative, rather than turning dirt, it’s spending time adopting DEI regulations. And that’s why I think, in significant ways, Democrats have lost the thread in terms of being able to build out infrastructure. And we have this system in D.C., where you pass a law, you get a great headline, $40 billion, we’re going to close it to provide there’s no follow up, there’s a handful of folks around here beating the drums, saying ‘guys that’s been 1,000 days and no one’s been connected.’ And so I think it’s important enough for outlets like yours and others to continue to bring this to light. But I do think there’s a through-line here of a fundamental inability to turn dirt and get infrastructure built out. 

Washington Reporter:
You recently met with Elon Musk, and you’ve criticized the FCC’s actions as being weaponization of the government. Why should an average American care about this? Do you think that this will stop with Elon Musk?

FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr:
I think the degree of weaponization of government power right now should be deeply concerning to everyday citizens. We are seeing it, as you noted with Elon Musk. Once he announced his intention to buy Twitter and turn it into now-X, we have seen an unprecedented surge in regulatory harassment of both him and his businesses. FAA has been going after him. DOJ, Southern District of New York, even the Fish and Wildlife Services they were wondering whether they should open an investigation because one of the launches from one of his rocket launches, they claimed it charred some bobwhite quail eggs in Blue landcraft. To me, that sounds more like surf and turf than a federal investigation. But there’s really no other way to explain the cross-cutting regulatory harassment that is being directed from the federal government at Elon Musk, other than to view it as retribution against what they view as, progressive enemy number one, and again everyday people should be concerned, because once the government starts to head down the path of weaponization, it doesn’t just focus on one individual. We see that across the board. Just look at what was exposed just recently with Mark Zuckerberg, in his letter to Congress, saying that the Biden administration, through weaponized action, forced him to censor the speech of everyday Americans. Memes, satire, information, were all targeted. Once a government crosses a line into weaponization, it’s rare that you see it stop, and we haven’t seen it stop. Just everyday people, trying to express their free speech rights, have been effectively censored by the government through pressure that was applied to Elon Musk. This entire debate about free speech is a great way of boiling down the political moment that we are in. When someone tells you where they stand on censorship, they’re telling you just about every single thing that you need to know about their approach to government power. Because on the one hand, we got free speech and freedom, and the other hand we got censorship and government control and kind of all else basically flows from there in this moment, in my view. 

Washington Reporter:
You just mentioned the letter that Mark Zuckerberg wrote. What do you think, from the government standpoint, about how government officials can be held accountable? 

FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr:
I would have liked to see Zuckerberg hold the line, but remember both the carrots and the sticks that the massive federal government was holding out over both Zuckerberg’s head and Facebook in general. They were threatening to take away their Section 230 rights. They were dangling this idea of aggressive antitrust actions. This wasn’t two people on a level playing field having a theoretical debate about speech. This was the heavy hand of the government swooping in. I do think we need a solution here. There’s some long term ones and there’s some short term ones. In the long term, we fundamentally need reforms to Section 230 that can promote more speech and less censorship. But I think the most important thing we can do in the short term is to call upon each of these social media companies to publicly and quickly disclose, particularly right now in the runup to the election, whenever a government official, whether it’s a Republican, a Democrat, just an independent bureaucrat, reaches out to them and pressures or encourages them to censor speech, they should publicly disclose that. Knowing that it’s going to be publicly disclosed would be a disciplining function on the government official, and hopefully stop them from reaching out in the first place. Now, if there’s some sort of real legal prohibition or an actual legitimate national security issue with publicly disclosing that, then instead of the public disclosure, they should go to the House Judiciary Committee, which is what Zuckerberg wrote to, go to the chairman, the ranking member, and make it bipartisan, and inform them at least. But we need immediately, these social media companies to say, ‘look, government officials, if you reach out to us, we’re gonna publicly disclose it. If you think your outreach is fine, then you decide, defend it publicly.’ But we should not have any more shady backroom situations where, in the cover of darkness, the government’s pressuring these social media companies. If it’s all above board, then let’s just have it be all above board. So the short term answer is, the company should be publicly disclosing when they’ve been pressured in a quick, timely way. And frankly, I think every social media company should commit to doing that between now and the election. I think that would go a long way. But we also need accountability. We need to identify these government officials that were putting pressure on Facebook, because it looks to me to be the fact pattern that involves the violation of First Amendment rights, and when a government official violates the constitutional rights of Americans, we hold them accountable for that. 

Washington Reporter:
Do you think that threats to free speech in the FCC realm are growing or shrinking? 

FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr:
I think about whether we have reached the high water mark in this surge of censorship. Are things starting to recede? I’m not sure, I’m not sure the tide is still coming or whether the tide is going. It’s a close call, because we continue to see it. We saw efforts a year or two ago by leading Democrats in the House from California, who wrote a letter to all the cable companies, effectively asking them to drop Fox News and Newsmax. We saw an effort by a Democrat prosecutor in Baltimore that asked the FCC to revoke the license of a local TV station that was shining a light on that prosecutor’s corruption, and we see it just recently, as you sort of indicated, in the last couple of weeks and months, the FCC has proposed to impose new regulations on political speech in the run up to this election. This echoes an effort at the FEC, a DNC-backed effort, to put new regulation that happen have to do with AI, but still, fundamentally, it has to do with new regulations on political speech. And most concerning to me, and this is sort of flown under the radar for most people, is in the FCC proposal, they say, ‘well it’s just a disclosure regime. It’s not that big a deal.’ But look at the legal authority that the FCC is claiming to do this. They go all the way back to the 1960s and they breathe new life into this long dormant 1960s FCC policy that said that broadcasters — radio and TV — have an obligation to police disinformation on their airwaves, and then if they don’t do a good enough job of that, then they get their license revoked. And that concept of the FCC being the nation’s speech police is one that we closed the door on for decades and decades and decades, and this FCC is reviving that for the very first time. And it’s truly a Pandora’s box. And I don’t think it’s a good idea for the FCC to be breathing new life into those cases that stand for the proposition that the FCC should be the speech police. I think there are some signs that things are getting better. Hopefully, with Elon Musk taking over X, that’s definitely a free speech platform, which we did not have before. That’s great. Zuckerberg says he’s not going to knuckle under to government pressure, we’ll see. But you still have agencies like the FCC that are reviving this long-dormant idea of government agencies operating as speech police. I think that’s a good direction. 

Washington Reporter:
One place that is definitely using the free speech police is, of course, China, and you were one of the most vocal people sounding the alarm about TikTok. Are you satisfied with the legislation that ended up passing that no longer banned TikTok but forced the CCP divestiture?

FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr:
On the one hand, you’re living through, as we talked about, sort of an unprecedented surge in weaponization of government. So there’s some concerns raised about the TikTok legislation from that perspective, which I think were legitimate concerns to be raised. On the other hand, there were some very tight, concrete limitations put in that legislation, and right now it’s off to the courts, and we’ll see what the courts say. But your point more broadly: the CCP is engaged in an effort that isn’t limited to any one vector at all. I happen to think that TikTok was an important threat vector, but they’re continuing to poke and prod us through every single different type of technology means, and we have to be vigilant. We took action on Huawei and ZTE, we took action on China Mobile and China Telecom. TikTok is another one, but there’s other threats that persist. I think DJI continues to be a real concern that Congress has been trying through the years to take some action on. I think Chairwoman Elise Stefanik in particular has been leading the way on some of those issues. The CCP is a real threat, and we have to be vigilant. It’s good and I’m glad we’ve taken some actions before, but again, it’s death by 1,000 cuts when it comes to the effort by the CCP to do his harm. 

Washington Reporter:
You’ve called DJI “Huawei on wings,” and Congresswoman Elise Stefanik has legislation about this. Is there anything from your vantage point at the FCC that can be done, or is this solely Congress’s prerogative?

FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr:
Right now, we need Congress to act. The FCC does have a list called the “covered list,” which is similar to the Commerce Department’s Entity List. It’s a list where you put the baddies on, but the FCC doesn’t have independent authority to put new companies on our covered list, and so we either need a national security agency to make a determination, or a specific sort of rifle shot legislation from Congress. And I think Congress moving forward on this is probably the right near term approach. 

Washington Reporter:
How can America ensure that China is not both out-innovating and out-plagiarizing us, especially as it relates to state-supported firms, whether it’s TikTok or Temu or Shein? 

FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr:
There’s a lot there that we can do. If we can get back to freeing up more spectrum, that really puts the wind at the sails of both Americans and allied countries when you look at the broader technology debate that we’re having. In other words, when we’re freeing up spectrum, when we’re bringing up permitting reforms, and we are moving forward with technology, it’s effectively a competition with China, meaning that standard-setting bodies look to the U.S. Capital flows to the U.S. So if we’re not moving forward, we’re losing ground to China. Starlink is a great example. The CCP is looking to launch their own version. I think they’ve just started putting up the first couple of satellites of their own, global high speed internet, low Earth orbit satellite system. And the geopolitical implications of those, again, are ones that hadn’t really been discussed a lot publicly. But think about when the CCP has capacity to provide high speed internet to any point in the world, when they do it with a content moderation or moderation filter that aligns with the CCPs values. Think about that. Think about when they go to Belt and Road and they start making moves into Africa and providing Internet services for the countries there and the leverage that it gives them in Africa and South America. Right now, Starlink is out there, and rather than engaging in regulatory harassment, the U.S. government should have their back. We want Starlink to go fast. We want Starlink to turn on service in Africa today. We want Starlink to turn on service in South America today. Because China is right on the heels with their own competing service. And I don’t think we fully appreciated the geopolitical implications of the CCP beaming the CCP version of the internet globally. We should be having Starlink’s back, Amazon’s Kuiper is trying off the ground and going as well. We need to be putting the full force of our government, our efforts behind the types of regulatory relief needed for them to succeed, to stay ahead of where the CCP is.

Washington Reporter:
Can you talk about the George Soros-backed proposal for a buyout of over 200 radio stations? Why is that concerning to you? 

FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr:
This George Soros-backed group is purchasing over 200 local radio stations spread across, I believe, 40-plus different local markets. I don’t have an opposition to George Soros or anyone else having a megaphone or a platform for their viewpoints, but what they’ve done in this filing is they’ve asked the FCC to create a special shortcut, or a Soros Shortcut, as it’s been called. So as they purchase these stations out of bankruptcy, the Soros group is getting financial backing from foreign entities, either individuals or otherwise. And normally we have a process that says, ‘look, if you have foreign entities that are investing in these broadcast radio stations, disclose those to us. Let’s run a process. We’ll review. It could probably be fine, but just let us know who it is so we can run a national security review.’ And what the Soros group is saying is, rather than doing that, which takes time, could take six months or nine months, they’re saying, ‘let us get control of the stations today, and we will wall off those foreign entities, so trust us. We’ll wall it off, and we’ll come back to it down the road to run, sort of the full national security review of those interests.’ And that’s what I’m opposed to. We should not have a Soros Shortcut here. The commission should be running our normal process, our normal review. I’m not saying that the normal review would uncover anything untoward, but let’s run that normal process, let’s not adopt this special Soros Shortcut. Frankly, I don’t think any of us in the FCC should think there’s anything special about the fact that Soros is involved that merits a deviation on the normal course of procedures. 

Washington Reporter:
If the government can quietly manipulate what free speech can be shared and viewed online, are you optimistic about free speech itself existing in a digital age? Where do you see the First Amendment concept of free speech in general going into the 21st century?

FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr:
I think the issue is on the knife’s edge. And one of the things that I talked to Elon Musk last week about was I thanked him for the stance that he’s taking for free speech. A lot of times, there are these things that get enshrined in our Constitution that can get layers of dust and it’s just accepted and we never revisit it. Well, the First Amendment itself is being revisited in a very, very real way right now. This is a live debate. It wasn’t that long ago that there was bipartisan agreement, the progressive left, the ACLU, everybody stood together and said, ‘free speech is important.’ The modern day op-ed actually launched on the pages of the New York Times back in the 1970s because the then-editor of the New York Times, John Oakes, said ‘diversity of opinion is the lifeblood of democracy. The moment we insist that everyone thinks the same way we do, our democratic way of life is in jeopardy.’ Free speech is the exception, right? We look back to the whole course of human government, free speech is, is something that we enshrine in the First Amendment, but it’s been very rare over the course of history. The reason that is is because free speech is the counterweight to government control. You cannot have excessive government control and free speech. I think the future is very much one that is in play right now. Are we going to have free speech and freedom are we going to have censorship and government control? It shouldn’t be, but I think it is the significant fight of the moment. 

Washington Reporter:
Thanks so much, Commissioner Carr.