Tethered to Trump

Meanwhile, Ted Cruz wants to restrict FCC’s power to intimidate broadcasters.

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr speaks at a Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee oversight hearing on December 17, 2025, in Washington, DC. Credit: Getty Images | Heather Diehl

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr today faced blistering criticism in a Senate hearing for his September threats to revoke ABC station licenses over comments made by Jimmy Kimmel. While Democrats provided nearly all the criticism, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said that Congress should act to restrict the FCC’s power to intimidate news broadcasters.

As an immediate result of today’s hearing, the FCC removed a statement from its website that said it is an independent agency. Carr, who has embraced President Trump’s declaration that independent agencies may no longer operate independently from the White House, apparently didn’t realize that the website still called the FCC an independent agency.

“Yes or no, Is the FCC an independent agency?” Sen. Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.) asked. Carr answered that the FCC is not independent, prompting Luján to point to a statement on the FCC website calling the FCC “an independent US government agency overseen by Congress.”

“Just so you know, Brendan, on your website, it just simply says, man, the FCC is independent. This isn’t a trick question… Is your website wrong, is your website lying?” Luján asked.

“Possibly. The FCC is not an independent agency,” Carr answered. The website still included the statement of independence when Luján asked the question, but it’s now gone.

Carr: Trump can fire any member “for any reason or no reason”

Carr, who argued during the Biden years that the FCC must remain independent from the White House and accused Biden of improperly pressuring the agency, said today that it isn’t independent because the Communications Act does not give commissioners protection from removal by the president.

“The president can remove any member of the commission for any reason or no reason,” Carr said. Carr said his new position is a result of “a sea change in the law” related to an ongoing case involving the Federal Trade Commission, in which the Supreme Court appears likely to approve Trump’s firing of an FTC Democrat.

“I think it comes as no surprise that I’m aligned with President Trump on policy, I think that’s why he designated me as chairman… I can be fired by the president,” Carr said. Carr also said, “the constitution is clear that all executive power is vested in the president and Congress can’t change that by legislation.”

Changing the FCC website doesn’t change the law, of course. US law specifically lists 19 federal agencies, including the FCC, that are classified as “independent regulatory agencies.” Indications of the FCC’s independence include that it has commissioners with specified tenures, a multimember structure, partisan balance, and adjudication authority. Trump could test that historical independence by firing an FCC commissioner and waiting to see if the Supreme Court allows it, as he did with the FTC.

Ted Cruz wants to restrict FCC power

Carr’s statements on independence came toward the end of an FCC oversight hearing that lasted nearly three hours. Democrats on the Senate Commerce Committee spent much of the time accusing Carr of censoring broadcast stations, while Carr and Committee Chairman Cruz spent more time lobbing allegations of censorship at the Biden administration. But Cruz made it clear that he still thinks Carr shouldn’t have threatened ABC and suggested that Congress reduce the FCC’s power.

Cruz alleged that Democrats of supported Biden administration censorship, but in the next sentence he said the FCC shouldn’t have the legal authority that Carr has used to threaten broadcasters. Cruz said:

If my colleagues across the aisle do what many expect and hammer the chairman over their newfound religion on the First Amendment and free speech, I will be obliged to point out that those concerns were miraculously absent when the Biden administration was pressuring Big Tech to silence Americans for wrongthink on COVID and election security. It will underscore a simple truth, that the public interest standard and its wretched offspring, like the news distortion rule, have outlived whatever utility they once had and it is long past time for Congress to pass reforms.

Cruz avoided criticizing Carr directly today and praised the agency chairman for a “productive and refreshing” approach on most FCC matters. Nonetheless, Cruz’s statement suggests that he’d like to strip Carr and future FCC chairs of the power to wield the public interest standard and news distortion policy against broadcasters.

At today’s hearing and in recent months, Carr defended his actions on Kimmel by citing the public interest standard that the FCC applies to broadcasters that have licenses to use the public airwaves. Carr also defended his frequent threats to enforce the FCC’s rarely invoked news distortion policy, even though the FCC apparently hasn’t made a finding of news distortion since 1993.

Cruz said today he agrees with Carr “that Jimmy Kimmel is angry, overtly partisan, and profoundly unfunny,” and that “ABC and its affiliates would have been fully within their rights to fire him or simply to no longer air his program.” But Cruz added that government cannot “force private entities to take actions that the government cannot take directly. Government officials threatening adverse consequences for disfavored content is an unconstitutional coercion that chills protected speech.”

Cruz continued:

This is why it was so insidious how the Biden administration jawboned social media into shutting down conservatives online over accurate information on COVID or voter fraud. My Democrat colleagues were persistently silent over that scandal, but I welcome them now having discovered the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights. Democrat or Republican, we cannot have the government arbitrating truth or opinion. Mr. Chairman, my question is this, so long as there is a public interest standard, shouldn’t it be understood to encompass robust First Amendment protections to ensure that the FCC cannot use it to chill speech?

Carr answered, “I agree with you there and I think the examples you laid out of weaponization in the Biden years are perfect examples.” Carr criticized liberals for asking the Biden-era FCC to not renew a Fox station license and criticized Congressional Democrats for “writing letters to cable companies pressuring them to drop Fox News, OAN, and Newsmax because they disagreed with the political perspectives of those cable channels.”

Cruz seemed satisfied with the answer and changed the topic to the FCC’s management of spectrum. After that, much of the hearing consisted of Democrats pointing to Carr’s past statements supporting free speech and accusing him of using the FCC to suppress broadcasters’ speech.

Senate Democrats criticize Carr’s Kimmel threats

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) asked Carr if it “is appropriate to use your position to threaten companies that broadcast political satire.” Carr responded, “I think any licensee that operates on the public airwaves has a responsibility to comply with the public interest standard and that’s been the case for decades.”

Klobuchar replied, “I asked if you think it’s appropriate for you to use your position to threaten companies, and this incident with Kimmel wasn’t an isolated event. You launched investigations into every major broadcast network except Fox, is that correct?”

Carr noted that “we have a number of investigations ongoing.” Later, he said, “if you want to step back and talk about weaponization, we saw that for four years in the Biden administration.”

“Joe Biden is no longer president,” Klobuchar said. “You are head of the FCC, and Donald Trump is president, and I am trying to deal with this right now.”

As he has in the past, Carr claimed today that he never threatened ABC station licenses. “Democrats at the time were saying that we explicitly threatened to pull a license if Jimmy Kimmel wasn’t fired,” Carr said. “That never happened, that was nothing more than projection and distortion by Democrats. What I am saying is any broadcaster that uses the airwaves, whether radio or TV, has to comply with the public interest standard.”

In fact, Carr said on a podcast in September that broadcast stations should tell ABC and its owner Disney that “we are not going to run Kimmel anymore until you straighten this out because we, the licensed broadcaster, are running the possibility of fines or license revocations from the FCC if we continue to run content that ends up being a pattern of news distortion.”

Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) pointed to another Carr statement from the podcast in which he said, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to change conduct, to take action, frankly on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”

Schatz criticized Carr’s claim that he never threatened licenses. “You’re kind of tiptoeing through the tulips here,” Schatz said.

FCC Democrat: Agency is censoring Trump critics

FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez, a Democrat, testified at today’s hearing and said that “the First Amendment applies to broadcasters regardless of whether they use spectrum or not, and the Communications Act prohibits the FCC from censoring broadcasters.”

Gomez said the Trump administration “has been on a campaign to censor content and to control the media and others, any critics of this administration, and it is weaponizing any levers it has in order to control that media. That includes using the FCC to threaten licensees, and broadcasters are being chilled. We are hearing from broadcasters that they are afraid to air programming that is critical of this administration because they’re afraid of being dragged before the FCC in an investigation.”

Gomez suggested the “public interest” phrase is being used by the FCC too vaguely in reference to investigations of broadcast stations. She said the FCC should “define what we mean by operating in the public interest,” saying the commission has been using the standard “as a means to go after any content we don’t like.” She said that “it’s still unconstitutional to revoke licenses based solely on content that the FCC doesn’t like.”

Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) criticized Carr for investigating San Francisco-based KCBS over a report on Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) activities, in which the station described vehicles driven by ICE agents. Carr defended the probe today, saying, “The concern there in the report was there may have been interference with lawful ICE operations and so we were asking questions about what happened.”

Markey said, “The news journalists were just covering an important news story, and some conservatives were upset by the coverage, so you used your power as FCC chairman to hang a sword of Damocles over a local radio station’s head… Guess what happened, the station demoted the anchor who first read that news report over the air and pulled back on its political coverage. You got what you wanted.”

Carr said, “Broadcasters understand, perhaps for the first time in years, that they’re going to be held accountable to the public interest, to broadcast hoax rules, to the news distortion policy. I think that’s a good thing.”

Carr then criticized Markey for signing a letter to the FCC in 2018 that asked the agency to investigate conservative broadcaster Sinclair. The Markey/Carr exchange ended with the two men shouting over each other, making much of it unintelligible, although Markey said that Carr should resign because he’s creating a chilling effect on news broadcasters.

Cruz similarly criticized Democrats for targeting Sinclair, prompting Sen. Andy Kim (D-N.J.) to defend the 2018 letter. “Chairman Carr’s threats to companies he directly regulates are not the same thing as a letter from Congress requesting an agency examine a matter of public concern. Members on both sides of the aisle frequently write similar letters, that’s the proper oversight role of Congress,” he said.

Jon is a Senior IT Reporter for Ars Technica. He covers the telecom industry, Federal Communications Commission rulemakings, broadband consumer affairs, court cases, and government regulation of the tech industry.