FCC
The FCC meeting room lobby.
On the first day of his second presidential term in January, Donald Trump issued an Executive Order targeting programs within federal agencies intended to promote diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (known commonly as DEI or DEIA). The order, titled “Ending Radical And Wasteful Government DEI Programs And Preferencing,” called on all federal agencies to promptly “terminate, to the maximum extent allowed by law, all DEI, DEIA, and ‘environmental justice’ offices and positions.”
A month later, Trump followed with another Executive Order directing agency heads to “review all regulations” and terminate existing DEI-related contracts and grants. Since the beginning of his term, agencies such as the Defense Department have stopped celebrating Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Black History Month, LGBTQ Pride Month, and other observances associated with marginalized groups.
Among the most enthusiastic backers of these initiatives was Brendan Carr, who Trump picked to chair the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in January after appointing him to an FCC commissioner position during his first term. In a chapter he contributed to the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 report two years ago, Carr wrote that the FCC, which oversees communications infrastructure for radio, television, satellite, and cable, “should focus its efforts on creating a market-friendly regulatory environment.”
Going further, he argued that the FCC could play a crucial role in combatting “Big Tech and its attempts to drive diverse political viewpoints from the digital town square.” Shortly after being appointed FCC chair, Carr announced a “Delete, Delete, Delete Initiative” in March 2025 that would identify “every rule, regulation, or guidance document that the FCC should eliminate for the purposes of alleviating unnecessary regulatory burdens.” By July, the FCC reported that it had removed “11 outdated and useless rule provisions—covering 39 regulatory burdens, 7,194 words, and 16 pages—from its books.”
Among the “unnecessary regulatory burdens” that Carr singled out for elimination were Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs—including the FCC’s Equity Action Plan and the Digital Discrimination Task Force, which sought to end the pervasive broadband access inequity known as “digital redlining.” He told Bloomberg News: “If there’s businesses out there that are still promoting invidious forms of DEI discrimination, I really don’t see a path forward where the FCC could reach the conclusion that approving the transaction is going to be in the public interest.”
Gigi Sohn, executive director of the American Association for Public Broadband, has raised serious concerns about Carr’s approach. “He’s completely changed the mission of the agency,” she tells The Progressive. “He’s transformed the FCC from an independent agency dedicated to ensuring that all Americans have affordable access to communications networks to one that is, for all intents and purposes, an arm of the White House focused on helping the President resolve his grievances.”
Victor Pickard, a professor of media policy and political economy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, has even harsher words for Carr, calling him “the most corrupt FCC chairman in the agency’s history” in an interview with The Progressive. According to Pickard, Carr “ruthlessly carries out Trump’s anti-democratic agenda, disingenuously using any pretense at his disposal to weaponize the FCC’s regulatory powers to reward allies, punish enemies, and generally shakedown media companies for Trump’s financial and political gain.”
Over the past several months, Trump and Carr have each taken special aim at larger media companies, particularly broadcast networks. In October 2024, before being elected to a second term, Trump sued CBS over its editing of a 60 Minutes interview with then-Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris, which he claimed was deceptive. Despite a lack of evidence that CBS engaged in journalistic malpractice, Trump demanded that the network should “lose its license” over the matter, and sued Paramount, the parent company of CBS, for $20 billion.
In early July, Paramount capitulated, agreeing to pay Trump $16 million to settle the case. At that time, Paramount was seeking government approval for a multibillion-dollar merger with Skydance, a media company controlled by David Ellison, son of Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison. Shortly after Stephen Colbert, a vociferous Trump critic, mentioned the Paramount settlement on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” CBS abruptly cancelled the show, announcing its end in May 2026. And, yes, the merger was approved.
In March 2025, Carr forced Paramount and two wireless phone companies, Verizon-Frontier and T-Mobile-US Cellular, to “abolish any DEI goals or DEI policy.” Carr also placed conditions on the Paramount-Skydance merger, including that CBS has to “put an ombudsman in place for two years, so basically a bias monitor that will report directly to the president [of Paramount].”
In addition, Carr launched an FCC investigation into Comcast, the parent company of NBC, over disagreements with its news reporting last month. “Americans no longer trust the national news outlets to report fully, accurately, and fairly,” Carr wrote in a letter to Comcast CEO Brian Roberts. He has also sent strongly worded letters warning against DEI programming to the heads of the The Walt Disney Company and Verizon Communications, Inc.
In the legislative realm, Carr has supported efforts by Congressional Republicans to eliminate funding for public radio and TV stations. Anna Gomez, the FCC’s last remaining Democratic commissioner, has called this move “a key step in a coordinated campaign to silence public media, and the latest attempt by this administration to censor and control speech,” noting that there have not been any similar efforts to threaten or defund Trump-aligned news outlets.
Sohn worries that Carr’s crusade against “woke” broadcasting networks will probably prompt them to continue to amend their programming and policies. “I haven’t seen a whole lot of courage from the big media companies,” she says. “So for Carr, why not continue what he’s doing if it works. Nobody is pushing back. Congress isn’t pushing back. The companies themselves aren’t pushing back. So I think we are going to see more of this.”
Yet for all Sohn’s pessimism, she holds out some hope. “There are still a lot of Republicans who are ‘institutionalists’ in Congress, including [Republican U.S. Senator] John Thune [of South Dakota], the Senate majority leader.” She says she doesn’t blame Carr entirely for what he’s doing to the FCC, because “it’s being demanded by the President.” Under a future President, the agency’s independence from the executive branch could yet be restored.
Pickard notes that while the information environment is likely to become “even further degraded” over the course of the Trump Administration, “the silver lining here is that after such destruction we will have to rebuild our media institutions from the ground up.” When such a time comes, he says, “We should begin thinking now about how our media can be restructured in a way that is truly democratic and not so easily manipulated by political and economic power.”