One individual served as FCC Chairman under President George H.W. Bush. The other individual was the FCC’s Chairman under Barack Obama and is chiefly responsible for placing Title II broadband classification on the books for the first time.
Both have teamed up to pen an opinion piece for Newsweek that slams the current Chairman and President Trump for having “upended 90 years of precedent and Congressional mandates to transform the agency into a blatantly partisan tool.”
The biting commentary comes from Al Sikes and Tom Wheeler, and they claim that “instead of acting as an independent regulator, the agency is being weaponized for political retribution under the guise of protecting the First Amendment.”
Sikes and Wheeler take aim at the president for using executive orders “to strip the agency of its independence.” They then fingerpoint Brendan Carr for having “exploited” the commission’s powers “to undermine the very First Amendment rights it is supposed to uphold.”
Sikes and Wheeler point out how Congress created the FCC in 1934 as an independent agency “free of the policy aims of the Executive branch.”
An EO requiring all independent agencies to obtain White House approval for “all proposed and final regulatory actions” released on February 18, 2025 by President Trump puts that in question, Sikes and Wheeler argue.
One day later, they say, a second executive order granted the FCC chairman—and all other Trump-appointed agency heads—unilateral authority to determine whether “ongoing enforcement [actions] in their regulatory review is complaint with the law and Administration policy.” This, Sikes and Wheeler claim, bypasses the other Senate-confirmed commissioners and effectively hands the White House control over the FCC’s enforcement decisions.
What makes Trump’s efforts so disconcerting to the two former FCC chairmen is that the First Amendment appears to be undermined while claiming to protect the “public interest,” something Sikes and Wheeler call “a vague concept whose imprecision invites abuse.”
And, like dissident FCC Democrat Anna M. Gómez, Sikes and Wheeler alluded to the “weaponization” of the Commission by Carr under the influence of the White House.
While Sikes and Wheeler criticized the Commission for going after Paramount Global and Audacy for broadcasts that the conservative Center for American Rights have lodged complaints about, they do give Carr credit for a NPRM that clarifies the meaning of the public interest standard. However, they added, “To his discredit, he has yet to follow through, nor has he publicly outlined the specifics of his definition of what the standard requires. Instead, he has commenced investigations into supposed violations of a standard whose details only he knows. Using vague government policy as a tool of political coercion is a tactic historically associated with authoritarian regimes. It is now up to Chairman Carr to prevent such abuse by clearly defining his construction of the public interest standard and its relationship to the First Amendment.”
