Brendan Carr

Brendan Carr is the controversial and high-profile chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) during the second administration of U.S. Pres. Donald Trump. He has been widely seen as expanding the scope of the commission, using its power in unprecedented ways against media companies whose practices he considers unfair to conservatives and the Republican Party.

Early life

Carr was born in Washington, D.C., in 1979. He grew up in the wealthy suburb of McLean, Virginia, with his parents, Thomas and Barbara Carr, and his sister Courtney Carr. Thomas Carr was an attorney who once represented Richard Nixon. Brendan Carr graduated from Georgetown University and earned a law degree from the Catholic University of America.

Career at the FCC

Carr’s relationship with the FCC goes back years: He interned at the agency during law school, and, after he graduated in 2005, he went to work for Wiley Rein, a law firm cofounded by the controversial former FCC chair Dick Wiley. (Wiley had pressed hard for deregulation while serving under Nixon and his successor Pres. Gerald Ford.) At Wiley Rein, Carr practiced corporate law. His portfolio included representing telecommunications firms on regulatory issues, work that uniquely prepared him for a career at the FCC. Carr left Wiley Rein in 2012 to serve as an FCC legal adviser. In 2014 he became an aide to Ajit Pai, one of two Republican commissioners at the time.

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In January 2017, when Pai was appointed FCC chair, Carr became the agency’s general counsel. That August, he also became one of the FCC’s five commissioners. As Pai sought to eliminate the net neutrality rules established during Barack Obama’s presidency and reduce regulations on wireless infrastructure, Carr became known as Pai’s most loyal supporter on the commission. Carr also did work building out 5G wireless infrastructure and expanding telehealth services.

In 2020 Trump became upset with the leadership of Twitter (now known as X), after the platform placed warnings on two posts in which the president made false claims about voting by mail. Trump signed an executive order meant to strip the company’s protection from lawsuits. Amid this conflict, Carr began appearing on conservative and business-oriented TV shows, voicing support for Trump’s actions. Many observers believed Carr was trying to attract Trump’s attention in hopes of being appointed the next FCC chair. It apparently worked: Within hours of a Carr appearance on Lou Dobbs’s show on Fox Business, Trump tweeted a link to the interview.

Carr remained an FCC commissioner throughout Joe Biden’s presidency. In 2024 he emerged as a likely candidate to become the next chair if Trump won the election. Carr, a known commodity in the world of conservative think tanks, contributed to Project 2025, the policy agenda compiled by the Heritage Foundation, listing seven objectives for the FCC. The first was to “promote freedom of speech.” He also argued for an expansion of the agency’s scope, saying it should take measures including the slowing of Chinese artificial intelligence development and the funding of Elon Musk’s Starlink project.

Leading the FCC and controversy

Trump nominated Carr for the chairmanship after he won reelection in 2024, and Carr assumed office two months later. From his first days on the job, he pursued his agenda aggressively. He opened investigations into the three largest TV networks, arguing that in forums ranging from presidential debates to Saturday Night Live, the networks had been unfair to Republicans. He also accused YouTube TV of “discriminating against faith-based programming” by suppressing a Hallmark Channel competitor, Great American Network, on its platform.

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Carr drew national headlines in September 2025 after the assassination of Charlie Kirk. In a podcast interview Carr accused the late-night TV host Jimmy Kimmel of engaging in a “concerted effort to try to lie to the American people” about the political views of Tyler Robinson, Kirk’s alleged killer. He warned that, if Kimmel’s network, ABC, and its parent company, Disney, did not “take action” against the host, the FCC would punish the network. In theory, this could have meant revoking ABC’s broadcast license. Disney immediately suspended Kimmel’s show. However, the outcry from millions of viewers who canceled their Disney+ and Hulu subscriptions led ABC to put Kimmel back on the air just days later.

In January 2026 Carr announced that TV hosts had to comply with a requirement to give similar airtime to candidates of both parties. Typically talk shows, which are deemed to be entertainment, have been exempted from this rule, but Carr said the FCC would no longer recognize them as such. He announced an enforcement action against ABC’s The View after it aired an appearance with James Talarico, a Democrat running for U.S. Senate in Texas, but did not give equal air time to Talarico’s primary opponent, U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett.

The situation escalated when Stephen Colbert announced that CBS lawyers had advised against having Talarico as a guest because the FCC might invoke the equal time provision. Colbert instead posted the Talarico interview on YouTube.

Carr said the rules would not apply to talk radio. “There wasn’t a relevant precedent that we saw that was being misconstrued on the radio side,” he said. (Cable and streaming programs are not subject to FCC regulations, which is why Colbert could post the video online.)

Longtime FCC observers have said Carr’s approach represents a dramatic break from the cautious ways the agency has traditionally operated. Kim Zrakin, the author of a book on the FCC’s history, told The Hollywood Reporter in 2025 that Carr’s approach was “jaw-droppingly different” from normal FCC procedures, and Michael Copps, a commissioner who served under Presidents George W. Bush and Obama, described him as “the most ideological chairman we’ve ever had—and the most political.”