Meet the Project 2025 Co-Author Who Wants to Run the FCC If Trump Wins
Brendan Carr knows who’s calling the shots in the modern GOP, so when he’s not fawning over Trump — a prerequisite for any potential appointee — he’s busy buttering up the world’s richest internet troll: Elon Musk.
By now you’ve probably heard of Project 2025 — the not-so-secret plan the Heritage Foundation cooked up for the next Republican administration, complete with a 900-page authoritarian playbook for overturning civil-rights laws, gutting environmental and labor protections, criminalizing abortion, and purging the federal government of any career workers who aren’t partisan loyalists.<
Project 2025’s contents are so noxious, unpopular and anti-democratic that even Donald Trump has repeatedly tried to distance himself from them — though at least 140 former Trump officials contributed to the plan.
What you might not know is that just one of Project 2025’s authors currently works for the federal government: Brendan Carr, the senior Republican on the Federal Communications Commission.
Carr has sided with big companies and against the public interest on nearly every important issue to come before the FCC. He’s also learned what it takes to get ahead in Trumpworld: telling lies, cozying up to the far right, insisting Trump can do no wrong, sucking up to billionaires and telling more lies.
Angling to be FCC chairman in a possible Trump administration, this once mild-mannered government lawyer has gone full-on Fox News fire-breather in a despicable-if-calculated attempt to get a promotion.
Carr’s vision for the next FCC
There are serious ethical concerns about a sitting commissioner participating in Project 2025, with no clear lines as to where Carr’s government role ends and his role as a private citizen working in his “personal capacity” begins. That’s why in July a group of 16 House members called for the FCC’s inspector general to investigate whether Carr “may be misusing his official position as an executive-level employee of the FCC to craft and advance a political playbook to influence the presidential election in favor of Donald Trump.”
Commissioner Carr’s contribution to Project 2025’s “Mandate for Leadership” is wrongheaded if relatively milquetoast compared to other chapters. He rants TikTok (which is not under the FCC’s jurisdiction) and China, unwisely calls for the elimination of Section 230 of the Communications Act, and endorses ways to enrich Elon Musk’s Starlink and right-wing broadcasters like Sinclair.
He makes it clear that under a future Chairman Carr, the FCC would do the bidding of big business unencumbered by notions of serving the public interest, helping those experiencing poverty or addressing racial disparities.
In a vacuum, this wouldn’t look too different from the reliably terrible ideas and complete corporate capture of previous Republican FCC chairs.
But Project 2025 isn’t a vacuum. It’s a cesspool.
The company Carr keeps
The priorities of the Heritage Foundation, which organized Project 2025, include banning the teaching of “critical race theory” (i.e., “accurate descriptions of U.S. history”) in public schools and universities, defaming the Black Lives Matter movement, denying climate change, amplifying false claims of voter fraud and attacking transgender kids.
Project 2025’s advisory board, organizational supporters and their known associates include an array of anti-abortion zealots, anti-vaxxers, Big Liars, book banners, climate deniers, conspiracy theorists, immigrant bashers and other assorted haters.
To achieve their Christian-nationalist goals, Heritage and its allies seek to undermine democratic checks and balances in favor of a system where near-absolute power is vested in the office of a strongman president. To quote the watchdogs at the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, Project 2025 is “an authoritarian roadmap to dismantling a thriving, inclusive democracy for all.”
This is the company Carr keeps, and that alone should be reason enough to disqualify him from leading a future FCC.
But if you’re looking for more reasons, he’s providing plenty.
Fox News’ favorite commissioner
While the FCC is technically an independent agency, Carr’s binary worldview is simple: Democrats can do no right, and Trump can do no wrong.
Witness his recent appearance at a House hearing where he refused to speak out against Trump’s preposterous and dangerous suggestion that ABC should lose its broadcast licenses because its journalists tried to fact check the former president during a debate.
To be fair, fact-checking isn’t Carr’s forte. In an appearance on Fox Business’ Mornings with Maria show, the commissioner happily agreed with the host while she made numerous misleading claims — several of which originated from Carr’s Twitter feed — about the efforts of the FCC and the Biden administration to expand affordable broadband access.
While Carr wrongly claims the Biden administration has “connected no one,” the reality is that the administration’s Affordable Connectivity Program helped 1-in-6 U.S. households connect to the internet before congressional intransigence interrupted its funding.
Congress and the Biden Treasury Department also have awarded $10 billion for broadband deployment, but that’s not even half of it. A bipartisan majority in Congress committed another $42 billion to expand high-speed Internet access in every state to support infrastructure and adoption programs. Under the infrastructure law that Congress passed, each state and U.S. territory had to design a plan to receive its slice of the funds. The job of Biden’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) is to collect data, ensure state plans are in line with the law and allocate the funds to viable projects serving the communities that need it most.
Infrastructure projects like these take time, as they should given their historic nature — think rural electrification or the building of the U.S. highway system — but the benefits last far beyond a single presidential term.
For Carr and his partisan allies, the historic and popular effort underway to close the digital divide looks too much like a win for the other side, so they’ll say anything to undermine its progress. Fox — whose corporate bosses want a Republican-controlled FCC to do them special favors — is always ready to provide a platform.
Sucking up to Musk
Carr knows who’s calling the shots in the modern GOP, so when he’s not fawning over Trump — a prerequisite for any potential appointee — he’s busy buttering up the world’s richest internet troll: Elon Musk.
Carr is constantly caping for the would-be efficiency czar. At every opportunity, Carr bemoans “a campaign of regulatory harassment” the FCC is allegedly waging against Musk. The truth is that the FCC stepped in to prevent billions in taxpayer dollars from being wasted fattening Elon’s wallet while failing to get anyone better service — unless they were on a golf course or living on a highway median.
The background: During the waning days of the Trump administration, Musk’s Starlink satellite company snagged nearly $900 million in government subsidies with a promise to provide internet service to rural communities as part of a program known as the Rural Digital Opportunities Fund (RDOF).
Free Press was the first group to sound the alarm that a huge amount of taxpayer money was being wasted under RDOF to allegedly deploy internet service to uninhabited areas, big-box retail stores, airport runways and luxury resorts. Because the Trump FCC did such a shoddy job of designing the initial program, many of the beneficiaries — including Musk — were poised to cash in by promising to serve little pockets of land that already had service or where it was unlikely they’d ever sign up a single customer.
When FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel took leadership of the agency and scrutinized the plans, officials identified $2.5 billion about to be wasted on projects that didn’t meet the program’s basic requirements. So they took the money back.
I’m old enough to remember a time when Republicans claimed they cared about saving taxpayer dollars and fighting government waste. But Brendan Carr is too busy licking Musk’s cybertruck shoes to worry about his hypocrisy.
Fortunately, Carr’s record is beginning to get some attention from members of Congress — but more need to speak out about his dalliances with the far right and his trouble telling the truth. His actions and associations should disqualify him from ever serving as FCC chairman, no matter who the president is in 2025.
