Brendan Carr during Breitbart interview

FCC chairman Brendan Carr this week didn’t simply make a public statement yesterday against Amazon, as I reported earlier today. The day earlier, on March 10th, he did an hour-long interview with Breibart News, providing a more complete summary of the FCC’s overall agenda since the change of administrations from Joe Biden to Donald Trump.

You can watch that interview here. To put it mildly, the shift in policy and approach at the FCC is significant, and appears to be generally moving in the right direction.

To understand the context, we need to first review the FCC’s approach during the Biden administration. My regular readers will remember the many stories during that time describing the FCC’s aggressive effort to expand its regulatory power, in many cases in areas completely exceeding its fundamental statutory authority. For example, it proposed new regulations designed to tell satellite companies how and when to de-orbit their satellites. It also wanted to its own bureaucracy for imposing those regulations, and went ahead and created it without any congressional approval. It also under Biden attempted to limit satellite operations that the astronomy community opposed, an action that was once again outside its statute authority.

Overall, the goal of the FCC under Biden was to expand the power of the administrative state, in as many areas as possible. And though there was push back from Congress, as long as a Democrat was president it was clear that this power-grab was going to grow exponentially.

After the 2024 election, however a Democrat was no longer president. Trump quickly moved in 2025 to squash the FCC’s power grab, with a stated public goal to instead streamline FCC regulations and speed license approvals.

Carr’s interview earlier this week essentially gave us an update on that Trump policy, and it appears this new anti-regulatory policy is moving forward, with a goal to eliminate ten regulations for every one regulation added. According to Carr:

We’ve gone through the FCC Code of Federal Regulations, which is our rule book. … We took each component of it and went to all the bureaus and offices, and we had everyone go through it page by page: which rule is outdated, which rule can we get rid of, which rule can we cut in half?

So far, we’ve gotten rid of, I think, just over 1,000 regulations. I think it’s 130,000 words that have been cut—300 pages that have been reduced from this Code of Federal Regulations. We’re just going to keep going to get rid of outdated, unnecessary regulations.

We’ve also taken a look at what we call dormant dockets—proceedings the FCC started and left open that create a regulatory overhang. We’ve closed, I think, something like 2,000 separate inactive proceedings at this point.

It’s one of our most productive efforts. We’re ahead of schedule on the 10-to-1 regulation requirement from the administration, where you get rid of 10 regulations for every one that you do.

This is the opposite of what was done under Biden and what was expected from Kamala Harris had she won the election. And this streamlining can only have a positive effect on the satellite and communications industry, as it will ease the burdens faced by both old and new companies.

We must still ask if this is Trump’s FCC: “Nice business
you got here. Shame if something happened to it.”

Not all is sunshine however. During this interview Carr did indicate several areas where the FCC under Trump is aggressively applying its power, though that effort seems more appropriate to the commission’s specific purpose. The FCC is working to force companies to locate their customer service call centers in the U.S. It is trying to limit robo-calls, and eliminate those that are scams. It wants to make broadcast sports events more readily available to the public, even if the owners of those events wish to do otherwise.

And it has already banned foreign-built drones from the U.S. If you want to get a license to sell a drone in the U.S., you have to build it here.

These new regulations should certainly be questioned, because anytime you give government bureaucrats power in any area there is the risk they will overuse those powers. At the same time, these Trump-era FCC policies do seem more focused towards helping American business and its citizenry. Rather than limit what Americans can do, these policies appear designed to help them, while working to limit the actions of the bad actors.

The trend is positive, but only time will tell whether it produces healthy fruit or dies on the vine.