‘abolish The Fcc’: Agency’s Pro-trump Tilt Stirs Small-government Conservatives

Brendan Carr’s use of the Federal Communications Commission to punish President Donald Trump’s critics is lighting a fire among old-school conservatives who dream of abolishing the agency — or at least clipping its wings.

Calls to eliminate or rein in the 92-year-old broadcasting and telecom regulator have emerged in recent months among conservative law veterans, libertarians at groups such as the American Enterprise Institute and some former Trump administration officials, who argue that its power over television and radio allows for unconstitutional overreach into policing content. Last month’s Supreme Court decision giving Trump carte blanche to fire leaders of so-called independent agencies has also amplified warnings from some conservatives about the risks of politics seeping into the agency’s agenda.

The groundswell from a small bloc in the GOP has been especially evident in the past 10 months, as Carr warned of possible penalties for ABC affiliates carrying Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show, threatened penalties for one-sided political interviews on broadcast television, and called in Disney’s lucrative TV licenses for an early renewal that could lead to the FCC revoking them. And it has some conservatives hoping Democrats might join them in defunding or defanging the agency.

“People are now beginning to understand that you can read a lot of life into an old, vague 100-year-old standard and do a lot of damage,” Adam Thierer, a senior fellow at the free-market-oriented R Street Institute, told POLITICO. “And the question now is, could there be some sort of detente between Republicans and Democrats to do something about it?”

Carr’s efforts have won him one major fan: Trump, who tripled down Thursday night on his repeated calls for the agency to strip the licenses of networks that displease him. After ABC and NBC declined to air his primetime address alleging vulnerabilities in U.S. election security, the president accused the networks of "fraud" and said their behavior "should mean a revocation of their licenses."

Yet even former Trump officials like Marc Short, who led White House legislative affairs during the president’s first term, see the appeal of getting rid of the regulator.

“It’s time to abolish the FCC,” Short wrote in March on X. “If Republicans were serious about shrinking government they would do it now. … Today many Republicans prefer to use govt to wield power like the Left.”

Carr has been unapologetic about his aggressive enforcement stance, arguing that pressing broadcasters to provide accurate, unbiased information and deliver for their local communities is essential to restoring trust in the media. And he’s expressed quiet amusement about calls to wipe out his agency.

“I think that we’ve done more to build bipartisan consensus to eliminate the FCC than AEI or any sort of libertarian organization has ever accomplished, even if you gave them a legion of fedoras to try to accomplish their goal,” Carr remarked during a May podcast.

Some Democrats also quietly hope for a possible odd-bedfellows alliance with Republicans — though they would rather impose guardrails on the agency, not wipe it out and lose its work on consumer protection.

“The calls to eliminate the FCC reflects a genuine frustration with the current abuse of the power,” Anna Gomez, the FCC’s lone Democratic commissioner, said in an interview. “Eliminating the agency entirely just removes the cop from the beat rather than replacing the one who went rogue.”

The Brendan Carr flex

Many of Carr’s actions have relied on FCC powers that the commission had seldom exercised in recent decades, including rules that forbid “news distortion” or require stations to offer equal airtime for opposing political candidates. In some cases, the rules allow Carr to decide whether shows such as ABC’s “The View” qualify as “bona fide news” — as he put it during a press conference in January, “if you’re fake news, you’re not going to qualify.”

In calling back the licenses of the eight Disney-owned TV stations for early renewal, Carr has cited Congress’ nearly century-old mandate that broadcasters act in the “public interest.” But even there he has been plowing novel ground: The FCC hasn’t revoked a radio or TV station license since the 1980s.

Besides fueling Democratic accusations of pro-Trump bias, the FCC chair’s tactics have given new life to longstanding gripes by small-government conservatives who say no bureaucrat should have so much power to police speech. They say that’s especially true in an era when rapidly changing technologies have vastly multiplied the ways people communicate and receive information, eroding the monopolies that once justified the agency’s existence.

“It’s coming up more and more,” American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Mark Jamison, who published a call to “disband the FCC” last year and served on Trump’s first transition team, told POLITICO. “The reasons for having an independent agency have declined, the industries involved are moving faster than you could possibly regulate, or even want to regulate, and so it's time to rethink.”

Carr embraces politics more openly than prior chairs, early on disavowing the idea of FCC independence and joining Trump in Mar-a-Lago, on the golf course and on Air Force One. In March, he took the stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference to declare that Trump “took on the fake news media, and President Trump is winning.”

Conservative discontent with the FCC began bubbling anew in September, after Carr threatened repercussions for controversial remarks that Kimmel had made about the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. Two groups of ABC stations and finally the network itself yanked Kimmel off the air for several days following that dust-up.

“Abolish the FCC,” the conservative magazine National Review wrote following Carr’s comments, arguing: “Empowering so-called independent agencies with nebulous laws that cover vast swaths of American industry is an open invitation for abuse by politicians and bureaucrats.” Similar pleas appeared in The American Conservative and Reason. 

In March, a Washington Post editorial suggested that in “a perfect world, liberals would take the same lessons from Carr’s attempted abuses, and a bipartisan coalition would vote to abolish the FCC.” In May, the research director for the Taxpayers Protection Alliance, which has typically embraced GOP business priorities, wrote that the group “cannot help but wonder whether the FCC should simply be abolished.” Ted Brown, the Libertarian Party’s Texas Senate candidate, repeatedly echoed the call this spring and summer. A Cato Institute scholar called for “defanging” the agency at the end of June.

The frustration has been apparent in isolated GOP pockets on Capitol Hill. In April, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) told POLITICO that “the FCC probably shouldn’t be involved with regulating humor” after Carr called in Disney’s licenses early.

Few are optimistic about actually wiping out the agency — a dramatic restructuring of government responsibilities around wireless spectrum, broadband expansion and TV and radio regulation that would take an act of Congress. Many Democrats would also likely oppose doing so, favoring generous regulatory policing of consumer protection issues like robocalls and equitable internet access. But the outcry reveals a persistent divide among Republicans about the agency’s role, with some preaching deregulation as a means to curb Carr.

“Mr. Carr, please say even crazier autocratic stuff so we can finally get the FCC abolished!” Thierer wrote on X in April, after Carr reposted a Trump social media post denouncing a CNN headline about the Iran war as a possible “crime.”

The White House and FCC have shrugged off the backlash. Carr maintains he is enforcing the law evenhandedly, saying the Disney license probe stemmed from frustration with the company’s responsiveness to an investigation into its diversity policies — not Trump’s ire at Kimmel. Asked about the calls for abolition, an FCC spokesperson said the agency “remains focused on delivering great results for the American people,” citing faster internet speeds, lower prices and intensifying competition.

“More good wins to come,” the FCC spokesperson added.

“The FCC under Chairman Brendan Carr is doing a fantastic job, and the Trump administration remains committed to the FCC’s mission of ensuring radio, broadband, and wireless communication access for the American people,” White House spokesperson Kush Desai told POLITICO.

‘I would hope free speech would bring us all together’

Senate Commerce Chair Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has emerged as many FCC critics’ best hope for restraining the agency, after voicing skepticism of both Carr’s choices and underlying agency powers.

While not advocating full abolition, Cruz last year floated the notion of reining in the FCC’s broad public interest authority — along with what he called its “wretched offspring,” the news distortion rule. “Democrat or Republican, we cannot have the government arbitrating truth or opinion,” Cruz told Carr at a hearing in December.

In June, Cruz unveiled legislation with Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) intended to prevent government officials from attempting to coerce broadcast and social media companies over their content choices — a bill that Cruz first teased last year after Carr threatened broadcasters airing Kimmel. (The bill also responds to conservative complaints that the Biden administration had pressured social media companies to suppress speech on topics such as Covid-19 vaccine mandates.) The legislation would allow for federal lawsuits against government leaders if people feel their free speech rights are violated.

“I think the FCC performs very important functions, including right now a historic spectrum auction,” Cruz told POLITICO. “I just want to ensure an FCC focuses on its responsibilities.”

In an interview, Wyden cited the broad coalition supporting the legislation, which he hopes will create a "healthier balance” reining in Carr’s actions.

“The First Amendment is really having a day in the sun right now,” Wyden added. “I don’t think it’s going to be, here you go, 15 minutes later, it’s law, but I think we’ve got a real chance to move this. I think it’s time.”

But the prospects for Cruz’s efforts remain unclear. Congressional Republicans broadly back Carr, and Cruz recently said timing for advancing the legislation is uncertain — a potentially ominous sign in a midterm year with few legislative days.

Other top Republicans are contemplating possible changes to FCC law but say their focus is on stripping arcane provisions, such as payphone rules, rather than confronting Carr’s authority over media.

“I just think given the political realities in the House and Senate today, abolishing the FCC’s probably not worth spending a lot of committee time on,” House Energy and Commerce telecom subcommittee Chair Richard Hudson (R-N.C.) told POLITICO. Still, he left the door open to considering changes spearheaded by fellow conservatives like Cruz: “If it’s a priority for Sen. Cruz, I’d certainly be happy to look at it.”

“I would hope free speech would bring us all together, but we’ll see,” Cruz said.

Democrats are quick to name-check Cruz these days, lauding his pushback to Carr and associating him with other smatterings of conservative alarm over the commission’s evolving institutional norms.

“It’s not surprising to me that conservative groups are showing more distrust with the FCC,” New Mexico Sen. Ben Ray Luján, the top Democrat on the Commerce telecom subcommittee, said in an interview. “Brendan Carr has destroyed that fabric, and I certainly hope that we can work together to get this put together. There’s a reason why Ted Cruz has been one of the most public critics of the kinds of things that Brendan Carr has been doing and the devastation of the First Amendment and making it so partisan.”

Crossroads to come

Conservative skepticism over the agency’s dominion also made a cameo appearance in the June Supreme Court decision that effectively stripped the independence of the FCC and similar bodies, including the Federal Trade Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission, by allowing the president to fire their leaders at will.

In a concurring opinion, Justice Neil Gorsuch cited the FCC’s claimed authority over “late-night comedy” while calling on Congress and the courts to whittle down agencies’ “vast … reservoirs of legislative and judicial powers.” Otherwise, he warned, presidents could wield those powers to nakedly political ends.

“A business out of favor with the party in control of the White House might be able to stave off an FCC investigation,” Gorsuch wrote. “But can it survive a subsequent FTC rule declaring unlawful one of its longstanding trade practices? … Or a prosecution for a new crime the SEC announces?”

But Carr’s conservative allies celebrate his exercise of broadcast authority.

Daniel Suhr, who heads the conservative Center for American Rights and recently urged Carr to revoke Disney’s ABC licenses, acknowledges that ideological tensions surrounding the FCC often pit him against “my more libertarian fellow travelers on the right.” Still, Suhr defends the agency as a bulwark against media oligopolies.

“For me, it's always been that the FCC is necessary because it's not actually a free market,” he told POLITICO earlier this year. “I can't just go start broadcasting my version of the news to every American household tomorrow.”

Abolishing the FCC is likely an ill-advised pipe dream for now, said Jeff Westling, a senior scholar of innovation policy at the International Center for Law & Economics, a market-focused think tank. But he said the chatter could eventually open the door to reworking the agency’s powers, especially in regulating broadcasters.

“We're hearing more of it because people are seeing just how far the FCC can go with its existing authority,” Westling said. “And that kind of scares some people — which it probably should.”