The Trump FCC’s regulatory guile

The first 19 months of the Trump Federal Communications Commission have changed the nature of the agency. For most of its history, the FCC was a policy-driven body existing in an inevitably political environment. Under the Trump administration, it has become a politics-driven agency employing policy as an instrument. Once an independent agency accountable to Congress, the FCC lost that independence when President Donald Trump issued an executive order requiring the FCC and other formerly independent agencies to submit to White House supervision. The agency subsequently deleted the word “independent” from its website description. Confirming his agency’s new lack of independence, Chairman Brendan Carr testified to Congress, “The FCC is not an independent agency, formally speaking. How the no-longer independent agency has exercised its new role is distinctly Trumpian.