There is a particular kind of institutional failure that only becomes visible in retrospect, though the literature on regulatory capture warned us about it decades ago. You take a 92-year-old agency designed to do unglamorous work, assigning spectrum and policing broadcast licenses, and you hand it to someone who treats the “public interest” standard the way a prosecutor treats a warrant: as a tool to be shaped around a predetermined target. That is what Brendan Carr has done with the Federal Communications Commission. And the fact that the loudest calls to abolish the agency now come from his own ideological camp tells you something the headlines about partisan warfare do not.
Carr has pulled forward the license renewals of eight Disney-owned television stations, a maneuver the FCC has not attempted against a major broadcaster since the 1980s. He has threatened ABC affiliates over Jimmy Kimmel’s monologues. He has mused aloud about whether “The View” qualifies as “bona fide news,” declaring at a January press conference that “if you’re fake news, you’re not going to qualify.” This is not regulation. It is the deliberate excavation of dormant statutory powers, dusted off and repurposed to discipline media outlets that displease the president. Carr has been candid about his posture, disavowing the very concept of FCC independence and appearing at Mar-a-Lago, on Air Force One, and at CPAC, where he declared that Trump “took on the fake news media, and President Trump is winning.”
What follows is the part that should trouble anyone who has read anything about institutional design. The conservative backlash, such as it is, has produced not a demand for better safeguards but a call to eliminate the agency entirely. Marc Short, Trump’s former legislative affairs director, wrote “it’s time to abolish the FCC” on X. The American Enterprise Institute’s Mark Jamison published a paper titled “disband the FCC.” National Review, Reason, and the Cato Institute have all weighed in with variations on the same theme. Rand Paul, never one to miss an opportunity to misunderstand the relationship between structure and outcome, told Politico that “the FCC probably shouldn’t be involved with regulating humor.” One almost admires the purity of the libertarian reflex: the cop went rogue, so fire the entire police department and let the market sort it out.
Anna Gomez, the FCC’s lone Democratic commissioner, put it with more precision than any of them deserve. “Eliminating the agency entirely just removes the cop from the beat rather than replacing the one who went rogue.” She is correct, and the structural logic here is not complicated. The problem is not that the FCC exists. The problem is that the person running it has abandoned the normative framework that made its powers tolerable, and the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on independent agency firings has removed the last structural brake on that abandonment.
Now Trump has nominated Danielle Thumann Severs, Carr’s own adviser, as a third Republican commissioner. If confirmed, the FCC would have a quorum without Gomez. Trump, who already fired the FTC’s two Democrats without cause and faced no consequence, could remove her. The Communications Act may offer stronger protections than the FTC statute did, as former FCC staffer Blair Levin has argued, and a court could determine the FCC more closely resembles the Federal Reserve, insulated from presidential removal. But that is a litigation bet, not a structural guarantee.
Federal Communications Commission (Public domain) via Wikimedia CommonsCarr, for his part, finds all of this amusing. “I think that we’ve done more to build bipartisan consensus to eliminate the FCC than AEI or any sort of libertarian organization has ever accomplished,” he said on a May podcast, “even if you gave them a legion of fedoras to try to accomplish their goal.” The joke lands because it is true. He has weaponized the agency so brazenly that libertarians and Democrats now share a rhetorical target, though for opposite reasons. The libertarians want the FCC gone because no bureaucrat should police speech. The Democrats want the cop replaced. Carr, meanwhile, wants to keep the badge and the gun, and he is one confirmation vote away from having no one left in the room to object.
The literature on institutional decay is clear on this point. The agency does not fail because it is captured. It fails because the people who should defend its institutional purpose decide that the institution itself is the problem, while the person actually abusing it keeps the lights on and the letterhead. Carr is not destroying the FCC from the outside. He is hollowing it from within, and the people who notice are arguing about whether to demolish the building instead of removing the man with the matches.