On his first trip as FCC chairman, Brendan Carr said Friday he was in western North Carolina to visit “several of Hurricane Helene’s hardest-hit areas where recovery and restoration are underway.” President Donald Trump visited the area ahead of Carr, before continuing on to California, which has been hit by massive wildfires. “Everybody is talking about California, and that’s a mess,” Trump said after he arrived in North Carolina on Jan. 24. “But I said, ‘I’m not going to California until I stop in North Carolina.’” Trump also signed an executive order on rebuilding roads in the region, eliminating the need for permitting. Carr said he will make several stops in the state, spending "time with emergency management and public safety officials, telecom crews, broadcasters, and other government representatives that are now working to rebuild these communities.” He added: “I am grateful for the surge in support that President Trump and his Administration have been providing to communities across Western North Carolina, including an Executive Order that will speed restoration efforts here.” Carr hasn’t made other travel plans, FCC officials said Friday. He went to California for a visit tied to the Dixie Fire in 2021.

A reported escalation of the FCC’s investigation into CBS is “a retaliatory move” against broadcasters over unfavorable coverage and is intended to “weaponize” the agency’s license authority, FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez said in a statement Friday. This came after a report in the L.A. Times said the agency demanded a full, unedited transcript of an October interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris that ran on 60 Minutes and Face the Nation. The FCC’s request is “designed to instill fear in broadcast stations and influence a network’s editorial decisions,” Gomez said. CBS didn’t comment. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr has said in interviews as far back as November that he expected the transcript to come up in the agency’s ongoing review of Skydance’s proposed purchase of CBS TV stations from Paramount (see 2411190051). During the first two weeks of Carr’s reign, “the FCC has shown a concerning pattern of implementing the will of the Administration on issues that go far beyond our core responsibilities,” Gomez said. “These actions disregard long-standing norms and ignore the mandate granted by Congress to the FCC to act as an independent agency,” she added. “They also set a dangerous precedent that threatens to undermine trust in the agency’s role as an impartial regulator.”

The loss of funding under the Chips and Science Act of 2022 could mean companies will retreat from investments they’re making in the U.S., experts said Thursday during an Information Technology and Innovation Foundation webinar. Advanced chips are critical to smartphones and many other devices made and sold in the U.S., they noted. Few smartphones are made in the U.S., but chips are integral to other wireless gear manufactured here. Experts also said investment in chip research helps drive innovation in the communications sector.

In one of the first big antitrust decisions in the second Donald Trump administration, the DOJ sued to block Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s proposed $14 billion buy of Juniper Networks. The department said its decision, announced Thursday, was based on the proposed deal's competitive effects on the wireless local area network market. Both companies said they will contest the decision, which they called “substantially disconnected from market realities.” The acquisition was pending for more than a year.

In a statement Tuesday, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr condemned proposed FCC rules on siting wireless and broadcast towers, small cells and other facilities in flood plains as the previous administration's attempt “to double down on broken environmental laws that benefit nobody but special interests.” The statement doesn't specifically identify its subject as the flood plain rules but an FCC spokesperson confirmed it refers to them. Those rules were stalled on circulation since 2022 (see 2204110047) and were among those recently pulled in a purge of agency items on circulation (see 2501270055). “It is time for America to build. It is time to unleash the growth and opportunity that has been stifled by misguided and outdated infrastructure policies,” Carr said. “Ending the FCC’s consideration of this Biden-era proposal is just an initial step.” He added, “I look forward to working with my colleagues and stakeholders to ensure that the federal government does not stand in the way of America’s broadband builders and the important work they have ahead.”

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr will undoubtedly continue focusing on his core issues of deregulation, competition, infrastructure development and national security, Venable lawyers Craig Gilley and Liz Clark Rinehart wrote Thursday. How quickly he can steer the agency in that direction will depend on Congress' speed in confirming Olivia Trusty as the third Republican commissioner, giving him the majority he needs, they added. A Carr administration means the agency will change course on communications policy issues including net neutrality, broadband regulation, digital equity, spectrum, rationalizing federal infrastructure spending and BEAD, and content moderation online, they said. Carr will likely take a narrower view of the scope of FCC authority and use competition, rather than regulation, to protect consumers. However, he will be a more aggressive regulator on national security matters. GOP control of Capitol Hill and the White House makes net neutrality "a non-issue over the next four years," though whether the FCC can explicitly preempt state net neutrality regulations remains an open question, the lawyers said. If the FCC's digital discrimination rules survive the current challenge before the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Carr's FCC would likely revisit and repeal them, they said. The Republican-controlled Congress isn't likely to restore Affordable Connectivity Program funding, "given where Congressional Republicans are on budget issues." They said they expect Carr's FCC to focus on streamlining rules for fiber and infrastructure deployment, such as limiting fees that states and local governments can charge for permit application reviews.

The FCC missed an opportunity by ignoring broader market competition in its most recent biannual Communications Marketplace Report, wrote Seth Cooper, Free State Foundation director-policy studies, on Friday. The report was approved 3-2, over dissents by now-Chairman Brendan Carr and Commissioner Nathan Simington. As he has in the past, Carr objected to the focus on market segments rather than on the converged market (see 2501020033). “The Commission failed to fulfill its statutory duty to consider the effect of competition between services that use different broadband delivery technologies,” and “the 2024 report made zero advancements in analyzing cross-platform competitive effects,” Cooper wrote. “Under new leadership, the FCC should abandon viewing alternative broadband delivery technologies as entirely separate and recognize there is a broader broadband market characterized by competition among fixed and mobile broadband services.”

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr announced acting leadership for a number of bureau offices Friday but not for the offices of Workplace Diversity or Communications Business Opportunities. An executive order that President Donald Trump issued Monday that ends federal diversity, equity and inclusion efforts could affect those offices and their staff, industry and FCC officials told us. Neither office was mentioned in Carr’s release Monday announcing the shuttering of other FCC diversity efforts (see 2501210070). The FCC didn’t respond to repeated inquiries about those offices' fate. Office of Workplace Diversity staff were present at an all-hands meeting that Carr held Thursday, FCC employees told us.

New FCC Chairman Brendan Carr has pulled all items on circulation for a vote by commissioners. “There are no Items on Circulation,” said a single line on the agency’s list, which was dated Friday. Among the items pulled was an NPRM that was seen as a preliminary step to an AWS-3 auction. It was not expected to be controversial (see 2501060044).

The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Friday that the FCC overstepped its statutory boundaries in part of its implementation of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act and vacated part of the agency's 2023 robocall and robotext order. In a 23-page decision (docket 24-10277), Judges Elizabeth Branch, Robert Luck and Barbara Lagoa sided with petitioner Insurance Marketing Coalition and said the 2023 order sets rules that conflict with the ordinary statutory meaning of the TCPA's "prior express consent" language. The 11th Circuit judges expressed skepticism in oral argument last month regarding the one-to-one robotext consent policy in the order (see 2412180008). The 11th Circuit vacated the portion of the order that states that a consumer can't consent to a telemarketing or advertising robocall unless they consent to calls from only one entity at a time and consent only to calls whose subject matter is “logically and topically associated with the interaction that prompted the consent.” The 11th Circuit also remanded the order back to the FCC for further proceedings. The decision was penned by Branch.