Brendan Carr, promoted by President Trump to head the FCC, could not have found a much more sympathetic interviewer than Ajit Pai, whom Trump elevated to FCC chair during his first term, and whom the wireless trade group CTIA just hired as its president and CEO.
That left the conversation between the current and former FCC chairs at this week’s CTIA 5G Summit 2025 devoid of fireworks. But their friendly banter onstage, starting with Pai jokingly introducing Carr as “the future CEO of CTIA,” did cast a little light on Carr’s policy priorities.
Restoring Auction Authority
His first goal is one that few voices in Congress publicly object to: securing a renewal of the FCC’s authority to auction wireless spectrum, which Congress let expire in March 2023. “I think one of the most important things we can do for the economy right now is to restore our auction authority,” Carr said.
He suggested that commercializing the upper reaches of the C-band, the subject of an FCC inquiry opened in February, “would be a really good win for the country if we can get that done.”
And yet Congress has now spent two years and change punting on opportunities to renew that authority, which Congress first granted to the commission in the analog-cell-phone days of 1993.
President Trump can’t executive-order his way out of this one, but Republican majorities in the House and Senate may not quickly yield a legislative solution either. The Defense Department has been reluctant to give up spectrum currently used for such assets as airborne radars, frequencies that prior spectrum-strategy plans have identified as suitable for commercial repurposing.
‘Delete, Delete, Delete’
Carr does not, however, need Congressional permission to exercise FCC rule-making authority that he said he will leverage to unmake rules. In March, the commission opened a “Delete, Delete, Delete” docket and invited telco firms to name the regulations they want gone.
Some of the early submissions have included requests to lift reporting requirements in such areas as workplace diversity and mapping broadband coverage. “If we can sort of get rid of these regulations that really only hold back investment, I think that’s great,” Carr said.
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As one example, he cited rules that require wired telecom firms to maintain copper phone lines for traditional voice phone service.
The chairman also said the FCC would return to easing infrastructure permitting rules, complimenting Pai on his work in that area. “We did a lot of reforms back then focused specifically on small cells,” Carr told Pai. “I think we need to take a look at expanding that relief to other forms of wireless and wired infrastructure.”
Many of the permitting rules that wireless and wired carriers face are set by states and localities. If you see a cell tower disguised as a tree, a church steeple, or even a cactus, federal rules probably had nothing to do with that.
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Sticking With Safe Topics
Pai did not, however, inquire about the net-neutrality rules that he rushed to undo under the first Trump administration, and which had seemed dead after Trump’s second election, even before a federal appeals court ruling in January struck them down. At the time, Pai championed this wholesale deregulation of ISPs as a boost to broadband investment, but subsequent evidence of such a cause-and-effect relationship has proven scarce.
He also did not ask Carr about his single biggest departure from past FCC practices: his willingness to leverage the commission’s broadcaster-licensing authority to punish perceived unfairness to Trump and other Republican politicians.
One of Carr’s colleagues, Democratic appointee Anna Gomez, has denounced these attempts as “a clear attempt to weaponize our licensing authority, to instill fear in broadcast stations and influence a network’s editorial decisions.”
But Carr’s own words of support for Trump, such as his characterizing Trump’s tariffs and other disruptions of decades of trade policy as being part of “a build agenda,” left it fairly clear that he is happy to follow Trump’s lead. (Carr has been photographed wearing a bright gold lapel pin of Trump’s profile, but he left that bit of flair at home Tuesday and instead accessorized his jacket with an American-flag pin.)
Carr’s description of how hard the FCC’s staff have been working since Jan. 20 stands out in that regard. “The first 100 days have been obviously very, very busy at the FCC,” Carr said. “We’re moving on Trump time.”
About Rob Pegoraro
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