Institutions don’t collapse all at once. They are hollowed out sentence by sentence until the only thing left is power without constraint. So when an agency starts deleting its own mission statement in real time to match the politics of the man running it, as we witnessed on Wednesday when Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chair Brendan Carr testified before Congress, it’s fair to say that the agency has already fallen.
For over 130 years, since industrialization made it impossible for Congress to regulate complex systems alone, the U.S. has relied on independent agencies to protect the public from concentrated power, an idea that is now under open assault with the Supreme Court last week signaling its willingness to expand presidential powers by gutting for-cause removal protections. Regulatory agencies were designed to be independent guardians of the public interest. But under Donald Trump, they are being forcibly folded into the executive branch as weapons. For more than two and a half hours, in the first Senate Commerce Committee oversight hearing of the FCC in five years, Carr revealed the extent of the rot that has set in at the core of America’s regulatory governance.
The FCC chair refused to say it would be inappropriate for the White House to pressure him to go after media companies. He also refused to say the president wasn’t his boss.
During Wednesday’s hearing, Democratic senators pressed Carr on whether he was carrying out Trump’s agenda. The FCC chair refused to say it would be inappropriate for the White House to pressure him to go after media companies. He also refused to say the president wasn’t his boss. Carr suggested, repeatedly, that Trump could fire him “for any reason or no reason.”
Sen. Andy Kim, D-N.J., finally cut through the evasions and said plainly, “Trump is not your boss. The American people are your boss.” But Carr had no answer. When he told the Senate that the FCC is not independent, contrary to the established charter of the agency, the FCC website erased the word “independent” mere minutes later in a quiet demonstration and normalization of authoritarian control.
Carr, an author of Project 2025, has turned the FCC’s long-dormant news distortion standard into a tool for the right. A rule that was intentionally so narrow that Carr himself once said it “very, very rarely applies” because of the First Amendment is now being wielded to intimidate broadcasters who air content critical of Trump. The FCC chair has reopened frivolous complaints against CBS, ABC and NBC, and he’s openly mused about revoking local affiliate licenses, threatening Disney that “we can do this the hard way or the easy way.”
When ABC late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel joked about the right’s reaction to the assassination of Charlie Kirk, Carr went on MAGA influencer Benny Johnson’s podcast and warned local stations that they might want to stop airing Kimmel. Disney subsequently suspended Kimmel. (He was later reinstated.)
In a public example of what institutional capture looks like, Carr denied it all on Wednesday. The FCC was created to protect the public from abuse by powerful communications interests. Under Carr, it has become a tool for silencing critics of the most powerful man in American politics.
The chair insisted that he is merely enforcing the “public interest standard.” But the FCC has not revoked a broadcast license under that standard in more than three decades, after the fairness doctrine was abolished in 1987. A partisan hack who has spent years auditioning to be Trump’s media enforcer, Carr suddenly portraying himself as a neutral umpire applying settled law is laughable.
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Ultimately, Carr has power now in part because of the Democratic leadership that waved him through. Nominated to the FCC not once but three times, he was unanimously confirmed by the Senate each time. Biden re-nominated him because he believed Carr’s statements about independence and free expression were sincere. They were not.
This was far from an isolated failure of judgment. Biden trusted Merrick Garland to defend democracy — but he dithered at prosecuting Trump for his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Biden trusted Christopher Wray to stand up to Trumpism at the FBI — but Wray’s deputies rejected investigating Trump. Biden ensured Louis DeJoy would remain as postmaster general — but DeJoy continued doing damage at the Postal Service. Again and again, Biden operated on the assumption that Republicans still believed in institutional norms, that they could be trusted to act in good faith if given power.
That belief was catastrophically naive.
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Democrats can no longer consider bipartisanship a virtue when the opposition’s ideology is betrayal. Trump and Republicans are actively working to dismantle democracy; the days of the GOP behaving like institutionalists are long past.
Even when Biden tried to appoint one of the most progressive telecommunications reformers in history, Gigi Sohn, moderate Democratic senators like West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, Arizona’s Mark Kelly and Nevada’s Catherine Cortez Masto helped kill the nomination. After its own party sabotaged a chance at reform, the Biden administration bent over backward to accommodate Republicans. Now we have a weaponized FCC hostile to the very idea of independence.
Biden did pull the country back from the brink of economic disaster in 2021. But his legacy also includes not only failing to prevent the rise of authoritarianism, but actively enabling it through misplaced trust. On Wednesday, he saw that trust proven wrong yet again.
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