WASHINGTON – President-elect Donald Trump announced Sunday that he has selected Brendan Carr as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission.
Carr is the top Republican commissioner at the FCC, the government agency charged with regulating radio, television and cable communications.
“Commissioner Carr is a fighter for free speech and has fought against regulations that have suppressed American freedoms and held back our economy,” Trump said in a statement. “He will end the regulatory onslaught that has crippled America’s job creators and innovators and ensure the FCC delivers results for rural America.”
Carr thanked Trump in a message to X.
“Thank you, President Trump! I am humbled and honored to serve as Chairman of the FCC. Now we get to work,” he said in the post.
Carr did not immediately respond to a request for further comment.
Carr wrote 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, advancing national security, unleashing economic prosperity, and ensuring of the responsibility and good governance of the FCC.”
In his chapter, Carr suggested that TikTok should be banned if it fails to break away from its China-based parent company — an issue on which Trump had conflicting views before joining the app 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 measure of immunity for the content on their platforms and allows them to “in good faith” certain objectionable content trust”.
“Congress should do this by ensuring that internet companies no longer have carte blanche to censor protected speech while retaining their Section 230 protections,” Carr wrote in Project 2025’s book.
The FCC consists of five commissioners with five-year terms, and only three can be from the same party, meaning the FCC is bipartisan.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
