Trump’s FCC Wants To DOGE Itself, Yet Still Somehow Bully Companies For Doing Critical Journalism Or Not Being Racist Enough

Earlier this month we noted how Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr thinks he can have it both ways. Carr desperately wants to please dear leader, and be part of Trump’s mindless quest to dismantle most U.S. corporate oversight and regulatory independence. Yet at the same time he wants to bully companies for not being racist enough, or harass media giants that report candidly on Trump’s grotesque corruption.

Carr’s obviously not alone. Fellow Trump-selected FCC Commissioner Nathan Simington and his Chief of Staff Gavin Wax wrote an op-ed this week calling for whatever’s left of the FCC to be DOGE’d by Elon Musk and his cabal of tween authoritarian simpletons. As usual the goal is to demolish oversight of corporate power, but dress it up as some kind of serious, good faith efficiency reform:

“The FCC is a prime candidate for DOGE-style reform. From redundant enforcement structures to legacy programs that drain resources with little oversight, the Commission is entangled by outdated practices that burden consumers, broadcasters, and taxpayers alike.”

Among Simington and Wax’s “fixes” for the FCC are (further) gutting programs that help the poor, firing a bunch of FCC officials they deem redundant (namely those working on consumer protection), obliterating whatever’s left of media oversight and media consolidation limits, and shuffling some remaining staffers over to the country’s fledgling space agency.

But they also make it clear that one of their key goals here is to throw billions in new subsidies at their billionaire godking Elon Musk:

“Wired internet subsidies are increasingly unnecessary and cost-inefficient. The rise of satellite broadband, such as Starlink, and fixed wireless alternatives offer a more scalable, less expensive solution.”

This is part of a broader GOP effort to steal billions of taxpayer dollars included in the infrastructure bill that should be going to local, future-proof fiber and wireless solutions (including popular community-owned broadband networks), and instead give it to Elon Musk’s congested, expensive, ozone-layer killing Starlink satellite service. That’s not “populism” or “reform,” it’s just sleazy cronyism.

These are not serious people. They’re dressing up FCC corruption and mindless destruction as some sort of serious adult policymaking. Simington was never qualified for his role. Wax in particular is a radical right wing zealot with a long history of dodgy bedfellows (including white supremacists), who has less-than-zero qualifications to be making important choices about absolutely any of this.

They’re just mindlessly taking a hatchet to government based on vibes and ideological bullshit picked up during half-completed readings of Ayn Rand novels. At the same time, Carr wants everybody to believe his lobotomized FCC has the authority to bully companies into bending the knee to authoritarianism.

But they’re going to struggle to have their cake and eat it too.

As we’ve well documented, Trumpism is completely demolishing consumer protection and corporate oversight with the help of the Supreme Court and numerous problematic rulings by the Trump-heavy 5th and 6th Circuits. We’re genuinely talking about permanent, likely-irreversible harms to corporate oversight, consumer protection, public safety, and national security. Malformed, ignorant extremism.

So you’ve got this tension here between a generational, cross-industry corporatist quest to finally destroy the entirety of consumer protection and regulatory autonomy — and this weird smattering of far right wing authoritarian zealots who still think they can bully companies after their agencies have been lobotomized by the increasingly radical, right wing courts.

Neither option ends well for healthy markets or the public. There’s genuinely nobody left at these agencies who seriously cares about the public interest one way or the other. But if you had to make a wager on which side survives this legal standoff, you’d likely have to chose the one with the deeper bank accounts and better lawyers; the side not peppered with weird tween trolls with bad haircuts who get overheated because the most recent Star Wars movie had a few more black people than usual.