Policyband Special Report: Exclusive Interview with FCC Chairman Brendan Carr
In his first long-form interview since taking charge on Jan. 20, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr discusses the First Amendment, DEI, NPR and PBS, Loper Bright, USF Reform, BEAD, Starlink and Much More!
On Feb. 21, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr sat for an interview with Policyband Editor Ted Hearn. The interview occurred in Carr’s 10th floor office in the FCC’s headquarters building in Washington, D.C., near Union Station and Capitol Hill. Following is a transcript of their conversation.
PB: Is there anything on your mind that you want to discuss?
Carr: We are roughly four weeks into this. We're having an absolute blast, really enjoying it. We've come out of the box really quickly with a lot of initiatives. President Trump, I think, has really set the tone. He came in and issued a lot of Executive Orders. Most people come in and they think they can turn the ship a government one degree here, two degrees there. That's the most that they shoot for. But he's really sort of fundamentally transformed the direction of D.C., and I think it's fabulous to see.
Since the election, I've been down to Palm Beach/Mara-a-Lago probably four or five times and the president's always in a great mood.
Right now, I think everybody across government is really executing in ways that the president intended based on the picks that he's made.
I think if you step back and just look at the country in general, it really feels like this wet blanket has been lifted and there's just so much optimism right now.
I really do feel like we're entering this golden age for the country.
And I think you're going to see it, whether it's free speech coming back, whether you're seeing it with sort of the economic future looking even brighter.
I think President Trump has come in and really set us on a really marvelous track, but it's been it's been great to spend time with him.
Like I said, I got four or five times down there on visits with him and it's been really great.
PB: The people who want you to revoke the TV license of Fox 29 in Philadelphia are some of the same people who say you’re a threat to the First Amendment. What's wrong with that picture?
Carr: Well, look, it's interesting. So, the last week that FCC Chairwoman [Jessica] Rosenworcel was in office, she dismissed four petitions. One had to do with Fox, and then one each on CBS, ABC and NBC.
What I did when I came in was restore the complaints to their prior status with respect to ABC, CBS and NBC.
With the Fox one in particular, that was one where the FCC had already sought public comment and had a record on it and only dismissed it after doing so. With respect to these other three, the FCC had never even bothered to seek public comment on.
So with the CBS one, we've now put that one out for public comment, and what I can guarantee everybody is that they're going to get a fair shake from this FCC.
It's sort of an odd posture to have some people pushing hard for the FCC to revoke Fox's license and then have serious issues with the FCC applying the exact same precedent that they pushed for in an even-handed manner.
And what I can tell you is that we'll give everybody a fair shake, and I think that's a departure from where a lot of President Biden's policies went. If your last name was Musk, then the government in my view was really weaponized against you, whether it was revoking this $800 million dollar award that they got, whether it was this cavalcade of investigations into Elon Musk's operations. On the other side of the coin, if your last name was Soros, you got unprecedented, streamlined shortcut treatment from the FCC. And so we were coming out of an era in which there was massive weaponization under the Biden administration. People that were politically allied got special treatment and shortcuts, and people that were perceived by the administration to not be aligned with them were given disfavored treatment.
And what I've said is we are returning to an even-handed treatment for everybody and the people that politically were benefiting from the weaponization of the government now feel like they're getting discriminated against when the reality is they're just getting even-handed treatment.