The leading candidate to head the FCC should Trump win re-election is facing calls for an investigation into Hatch Act violations after he helped co-author the controversial Project 2025.
Sixteen House Democrats have sent a letter to government officials arguing that Carr’s involvement in the openly political Project 2025 is a clear violation of the Hatch Act and should be investigated:
“The Misuse of Position Rule clearly prohibits federal employees from using their government positions, titles, or authority to sign letters, write op-eds, speak in their personal capacity, or—as it were—draft the blueprint for archconservatives to take over their agency.”
For his part, Carr claims he was only participating in the controversial project in his capacity as a citizen, and received the green light from FCC ethics officials before his participation. Even should he be investigated and found culpable, fines for Hatch Act violations are generally rather pathetic.
Project 2025 is, if you’re unfamiliar, a extremist proposal being circulated by key MAGA Republicans that calls for the mass firing of civil servants based on their ideological beliefs, a radical and undemocratic expansion of power for the president, the dismantling of the Department of Education, numerous new corporate tax cuts, draconian new abortion restrictions, and a ban on pornography.
FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr, who, you’ll recall, spends most of his time on cable news complaining about a company he doesn’t actually regulate (TikTok) in order to get attention, wrote a chapter about what should happen at the FCC under a second Trump term.
If you’re familiar with Carr there’s nothing too surprising here. Instead of proposing the agency do its actual job and protect competition and consumers from the whims of AT&T and Comcast, Carr instead calls for a dramatic expansion of the agency’s efforts to “rein in big tech” (which in Trump parlance means harassing any company that tries to moderate racist right wing political propaganda on social media).
Carr has a few sections of his chapter where he pretends he’s interested in “empowering consumers,” but again that mostly involves vaguely whining about tech companies and a dangerous dismantling of Section 230. It has nothing to do with “antitrust reform” or “reining in corporate power” and everything to do with bullying companies that don’t toe the increasingly unhinged authoritarian line.
Should Trump win the next election and Carr is appointed FCC boss, his biggest proposal will indisputably be a giant new telecom tax on tech companies. For half a decade now, AT&T, Comcast, Verizon and friends have used Carr as the spearhead for their plan to impose major new taxes on tech giants under the pretense of funding U.S. broadband deployment (sometimes called “sender pays”).
I’ve discussed (more times than how I can count) how this unserious policy is largely just a handout to subsidy-abusing regional telecom monopolies. It involves falsely claiming that tech companies get a “free ride on the internet” and should pay telecom giants billions of dollars for no coherent reason.
It’s a plan that drives up costs for consumers (since tech companies will simply forward the costs on to you) and effectively breaks the internet (just ask the Internet Society). In South Korea it drove companies like Twitch out of the country because they couldn’t afford to do business. All so telecom giants with a long history of subsidy fraud and abuse can get billions in additional subsidies.
I’ve written extensively on why Carr and AT&T’s call for a “big tech telecom tax” isn’t serious adult policy, but I’m still not entirely sure that “big tech” execs fully understand the scope. In the EU, telecoms have pushed proposals that would charge any internet service that accounts for over 5 percent of a telco’s average peak traffic billions of dollars in additional extra-government surcharges “just because.”
To be clear, the FCC’s Universal Service Fund (USF) program (which helps fund rural and school broadband) is in a dire need of a revamp, since the contributions historically came from levies on your home phone line.
And while Democrats and Republicans have flirted with the idea of including tech companies in that contribution base, I (as somebody that has studied this sector for decades) think it makes more sense to address widespread existing subsidy program fraud and abuse by industry giants and take direct aim at monopoly power (which is directly responsible for high broadband costs and stunted deployment).
That’s not stuff Carr is interested in because it’s not something AT&T and Comcast are interested in.
What Carr and AT&T are interested in is a big fat punitive, nontransparent, and badly managed tax that will be pocketed by subsidy-abusing telecom giants in exchange for fiber networks you’ll probably never actually see. And if Carr is Trump’s pick to head the FCC (a position Carr has been positioning himself for for the better part of a decade) it’s absolutely a policy that’s getting implemented on day one.
