FCC Chair Brendan Carr on Drone Dominance, Wireless Security, and the Satellite Race

President Trump just returned from Beijing, where he and Xi Jinping spent two days hashing out a new phase in U.S.–China great power competition. A lot is up for negotiation, from AI chip sales to soybeans. But while the headlines focus on what each side is willing to give on, the Federal Communications Commission has been taking an aggressive line on national security—on drones, Wi-Fi routers, the foreign labs that test our electronics, and more. If you read the news a lot, you might think the FCC is mostly focused on disputes over broadcast television. But the agency is at the center of some of the most consequential issues in economic and national security policy right now. And it has been very busy.

In the last 18 months, the FCC has cracked down on foreign-made drones and foreign-made Wi-Fi routers, moved to bar Chinese state-owned carriers from interconnecting with U.S. networks, worked with e-commerce sites to scrub millions of prohibited Chinese device listings off Amazon and eBay, kicked Chinese-controlled testing labs out of the American certification system, and greenlit more than $40 billion in wireless spectrum transactions that could reshape the mobile and satellite markets for the next decade.

Step back, and a bigger question comes into focus: what kind of FCC has this become? For decades, the Republican vision of the FCC was mostly a deregulatory one—fewer rules, lighter touch, more reliance on markets. While Carr has done plenty of deregulation, he's also been willing to flex the agency's muscle to achieve specific priorities, from reshoring jobs and manufacturing to securing protections for wireless tower workers in merger contexts. Some of those actions run contrary to traditional libertarian and conservative notions of the role of government. Proponents call it a long-overdue correction to the Republican party's free market absolutism. Critics call it coercion and interference in the market. Either way, it is a real shift and one of the things we discuss on today's show.

Evan is joined by FCC Chairman Brendan Carr to talk about drones, Wi-Fi routers, and the broader national security agenda; the recent EchoStar / AT&T / SpaceX spectrum transactions and what they mean for the emerging direct-to-device satellite market; the wireless tower workforce commitments that have become a signature of his merger reviews; and the issues he sees on the agency's horizon.

Evan worked for Brendan Carr when he was a Commissioner at the FCC during the first Trump administration.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome to the Center Edge. I'm Evan Swartstrauber. President Trump just returned from Beijing, where he and Xi Jinping spent two days hashing out a new phase in U.S. China great power competition. AI chip sales, soybeans, rare earths, farmland, university students, and tariffs, a lot is on the table for negotiation with China. But while the headlines center on what the US and China are willing to give on, the Federal Communications Commission, led by my guest today, Brendan Carr, has been taking an aggressive line on national security, from drones and wireless routers to the foreign labs that test our electronics and the Chinese state-owned telecom firms that want to connect with U.S. networks. If you read the news a lot, you might think the FCC is mostly focused on disputes over broadcast television. But the agency is at the center of some of the most consequential issues in economic and national security policy right now, and it has been very busy over the past 18 months when Carr assumed the role of chairman. In that stretch, the agency has taken action to crack down on foreign-made drones and foreign-made Wi-Fi routers. It moved to bar Chinese state-owned carriers from interconnecting with U.S. networks. It's worked with e-commerce sites like Amazon and eBay to scrub millions of prohibited devices from listings. And the agency just recently green-lit more than $40 billion in wireless spectrum transactions that could reshape the mobile and satellite markets for the next decade. Now, taking a step back, Carr's tenure is also a manifestation of larger debates on the role of the FCC. For decades, the Republican vision of the FCC and most agencies was focused on deregulation and letting the free market run mostly undisturbed. Now, to be clear, Carr has done plenty of deregulation, including through a signature initiative known as delete-delete-delete. But in many instances, Carr has been willing to flex the agency's muscle to achieve certain priorities, from pushing to reshore jobs and manufacturing to securing worker protections and merger review. Many of those actions may run contrary to traditional libertarian and conservative notions of the role of government. Proponents say this is a long-overdue correction to free market absolutism. Critics call it coercion and interference in the market. Either way, it is a real shift, and it's one of the things we'll discuss today. A disclosure, I worked for Chairman Carr when he was a commissioner at the FCC under the first Trump administration. I've watched him climb a lot of wireless towers. I've also watched an agency that historically focused on mundane telecom rules turn into a major front in global competition. Today we're going to talk about drones, routers, the broader national security agenda, how the FCC is impacting the cellular and satellite markets, and other issues on the agency's horizon. Chairman, thanks so much for joining.

SPEAKER_00 2:38

Yeah, so good to be with you. Great to be here for episode number one. You can really only go up from here, but looking forward to the conversation. Like literally, the numbers go up, not necessarily quality.

SPEAKER_02 2:48

Exactly right. Well, you keep a very low profile, so thank you for sticking your head out from under that rock and doing a media appearance.

SPEAKER_01 2:54

I really appreciate you making an exception for me. I feel very special. Yeah. Um, so I want to talk about drones uh first. Now, late last year, the agency, under your leadership, added all foreign-produced, I guess we call them, unmanned aircraft system UAS, we can call them drones on the show or UAS, all UAS and critical components to the agency's covered list. Now, this came after the White House came to you with a determination that foreign-made drones pose, quote, unacceptable risks to national security of the US and to the safety and security of US persons. Now, this is not retroactive. So for you listeners that have some drone that was produced overseas, you can still use it. You're not going to go to FCC jail. But what it this means going forward is that foreign-made drones, unless there's an exception, they're not authorized. And a lot of people may not know this, but pick up a Bluetooth speaker, pick up a you know, Alexa or whatever, you might see an FCC logo on it. Almost every device in the US that transmits a wireless signal has to come through your desk. So that's a big responsibility. And that also gives you a point to say this is not allowed in the US, this can't be marketed, this can't be sold. Um, so it's if you violate those rules, essentially counterfeit. Now, in the fact sheet, I noticed that you talked about what the president has talked about, which is we have these big gatherings coming up, right? We have America 250 celebration, we have LA Olympics in 2020, the we for FIFA World Cup this year. And it seems like there's a concern around these mass gathering events and the potential uh risks of drones. Uh, can you get into what the specific concerns are? Is it, you know, news outlets are using drones, but you won't be able to tell that one of them is like a Chinese spy? Like what exactly is driving this move to ban foreign-made drones?

SPEAKER_00 4:33

Well, thanks for raising this. I think the FCC's work on drones and promoting a domestic US drone leadership is some of the most important work that we're doing at the FCC. I mean, if you look at the headlines that that touch on the agency, usually it has to do something with the media areas or various TV programs. But in terms of what's really going to make a lasting impact, this is one of the things. So one of the first things that I did when I became chairman of the FCC was to stand up a new council on national security within the FCC. And this is an area where there's actually a lot of bipartisan consensus on protecting the U.S. and our telecom networks from the threats posed by foreign adversaries and bad actors. So the FCC was one of the first out of the gate during the Trump 45 administration. We were the agency that took action on Huawei and ZTE, effectively keeping that spy gear out of our networks. That work has accelerated. To your point, the FCC has something called a covered list, where you can't bring in any piece of electronics or sell it or use it in the U.S. without an approval from the FCC. And putting something on the covered list effectively prohibits it from being used in the U.S. President Trump has come out very strongly, and he said that we're going to have American drone dominance. So that's two things. One, we're going to move much more quickly to approve for use in the U.S., you know, drones that are manufactured and produced here. Second, we have broadly prohibited foreign drones from being approved for use in the U.S. We're moving on both of those fronts. And effectively, you don't want a Huawei on wings. You don't want something that can be collecting data, collecting intelligence, sending it back to a foreign adversary nation. Um, and so we've taken concrete steps there, but we do it in conjunction with other executive branch, national security entities. Actually, just last week I was in um Fort Bragg, North Carolina. I went on a visit there with the Secretary of the Army, Secretary Driscoll, and we were working through a lot of these issues having to do with drones, whether you have drone swarms coming to the U.S., counter-UAS, counter-drone activities. The FC is part of a joint task force called Giada 401, but this is a real serious work stream across multiple agencies. We see drone, drone warfare, um, threats to mass gathering events as something that should be taken seriously. And we're putting lots of procedures in place and mechanisms in place to help make sure that we're safe.

SPEAKER_01 6:48

There's been some gripes, uh, understandably, not surprisingly, from the companies that are affected by these actions, right? So you have DJI, which is a big Chinese manufacturer of drones. They're suing uh the FCC over this. You had another um Autel, another Chinese uh manufacturer that claimed, you know, hey, we have data minimization, right? Where the flight data is stored locally by default, you know, cloud backups are off by default. We've never gotten a request from a US adversary. So that's China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia, Venezuela. You know, we've never gotten these requests. We wouldn't honor them if we did. And some of these companies are also saying, well, you make these determinations based on classified information. We can't see that. So how are we supposed to argue with you? What do you make of the pushback? Because as someone who worked at the FCC, I know you are required, right, by law to look at all these comments that come in and give them a fair hearing. You know, when you see a company say, well, we've never spied, we would never spy, what do you make of that?

SPEAKER_00 7:43

Well, we're proceeding on basically two fronts. Uh, on the one hand, we are not going to compromise on national security, obviously. On the second hand, we are moving in a way that's balanced from an economic perspective. So the first thing we do when we add something to the covered list is we prohibit new models of that device from getting imported for use in the U.S. So you have an existing model of DJI or something else. You can continue to use that existing model. Now, we do have some authorities that in the right circumstances would allow us to reach back and impact existing models. Again, still probably not taking them out of people's hands by any stretch, but new versions of the same type of a model. We do have to support our decisions with a record. That record is appealable. If there are classified portions of that record, then that'll be made available to the judges and we'll litigate those cases.

SPEAKER_01 8:32

Yeah, and you've seen some entities that have bought Chinese drones over the years. They're saying, you know, we like them and they're great. I think that gets to, you know, another thing I wanted to talk to you about, which is boosting American production, right? Because the decision's made and people can gripe all they want and say, I want to keep buying the new DJI, but the decision has been made. So how do you move forward? And you recently visited Anderal. And uh, for folks who are unfamiliar, this is you know one of like the hottest companies when you talk about defense and technology. It's a defense tech company. They sell drones, unmanned aerial systems that are AI powered. They also do a lot on counter UAS, which is essentially sensor towers and ways to detect drones and disrupt malign activity. And uh you visited them, and also last month, you unleashed a proposal called Unleashing American Drone Dominance. Now, I think it's fair to say, I'm not a war college guy, but I think it's fair to say one of the lessons coming out of the Ukraine-Russia war, even arguably some aspects of the US-Iran conflict, other conflicts around the world, is that drones are becoming increasingly important. And even when you have overwhelming military power in terms of the traditional metrics, right? You know, F-35 jets, tanks, Navy, etc., a lesser power can frustrate a larger power with just these cheap drones. You attach grenades to them. Daryl Issa recently, he's the vice chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, he was doing an interview with the Washington Reporter and written up by Matthew Foldy, and he said, you know, most of the deaths in Ukraine come from these like less than a hundred pound drones. You know, could be a hundred to two hundred bucks made in China. So this is obviously an area that you and others see as strategically important to boosting U.S. manufacturing. Now, some of the this is going to be out of your hands, right? The what the Defense Department chooses to buy procurement, how do you maybe we subsidize these to counter cheap Chinese drones? But this is something that the FCC is really focused on. So what role do you see the agency playing in boosting, effectively industrial policy, boosting American manufacturing of drones, understanding that China's been flooding the market with cheap drones for a long time?

SPEAKER_00 10:36

We're certainly entering a new era of drone warfare and potentially drone terrorism. I think the agencies are learning a lot watching what's happening in Ukraine, watching what's happening in the Middle East. And what we've done at the FCC is we have stood up a new proceeding, as you noted, talking about unleashing American drone dominance. And we're looking at everything from going faster on spectrum that's available for drones, the FC's equipment authorization process. And one area where I really want to see significant progress has to do with testing. So it used to be that it would take and still takes, you know, six to nine months to get approved to test a counter drone or a jamming device. And then you have to take another six, nine months to wait for time at a federal test range. And that type of cycle of development doesn't cut it today. We have to be able to iterate much faster. We need people to be able to take their approvals and test over multiple frequencies. Again, you're authorized to test on one frequency at one point in time. If you want to change one thing, you need to go through the process again. And that's not going to cut it when you look at how fast things are changing on the battlefield right now. And so I did this visit, as you noted, with Andrew. And we're working broadly to make sure that companies like that can test across a wide range of spectrum bands on a much faster, iterative cycle. And if we get that right, that's going to help to back and support a domestic U.S. drone manufacturing base. Because when you're competing against entities that are based in China, you're effectively competing with a state. There oftentimes is very little difference between the CCP itself and a company, ostensibly a company based in China. And here we have a very different process. So we need to go much faster at authorizing and approving the testing of drones and counter drones, and we're putting a plan in place at the FCC to do just that.

SPEAKER_01 12:17

And then talking with engineers at Endoral, do you get a sense of what types of wireless airwaves these companies are interested in using? Right. I'm going to do like the most poor man's 10 cent version of Telecom 101 here, but you know, low frequency, you're talking, you know, AM radio travels across massive distances. People used to listen to out-of-market baseball games because of how far these things go. Um, and then you have, of course, you know, mid-band spectrum, which is like the Goldilocks, sweet spot, high capacity, high data used for 5G, Wi-Fi, et cetera. And then there's really high bands that travel short distances. And now you have satellite networks coming online. You, of course, have major nationwide carriers. Do the drone operators and the drone manufacturers have a sense of which spectrum assets they want to use? Are they just going to partner with cell phone companies that essentially run on the same network as my cell phone or my car? Are they going to be partnering with SpaceX and Amazon with their low Earth orbit? Or do you think they need dedicated spectrum carved out for drones because of the sensitivity of the work? Like, did you get a sense of that from visiting with this company?

SPEAKER_00 13:20

Well, right now there's, I think the way I think about it from a spectrum perspective is it falls into three different buckets. On the one hand, you have a lot of what we call unlicensed spectrum. So that's spectrum, for instance, that your Wi-Fi router at home uses. It's low barriers to entry, meaning anybody can use that type of spectrum. There's a lot of drone and counter-drone technology that's working on those unlicensed bands. We then have a lot of people that are requesting, you know, specific dedicated drone spectrum. We're looking at that as a general regulatory philosophy. We don't like picking a particular technology and giving it its own spectrum band, but we're open-minded whether that might be necessary in the unique circumstances here. The third issue is you have regular traditional mobile wireless spectrum. So what your cell phone uses today, we actually have rules that have limited the ability of that spectrum to be used for drones for various reasons in terms of connecting to a device that's actually flying through the air. And so we're open-minded at the FCC to potentially modifying our regulations so that drones can potentially get access to that same spectrum that your cell phone network works on today. Now, of course, if you're trying to do counter drones and jamming, that technology needs to cover basically every single spectrum band that a drone could be operating on.

SPEAKER_01 14:28

And you talked about potentially in this notice from April 1st, establishing drone innovation zones. What does that look like? Is that essentially an area of the country where maybe there's not a lot of wireless activity and you can just really open it up for experimentation and tell these guys, let loose, you know, experiment on different bands because we at the FCC, we have all these engineers and we know that you're not going to mess with anything because you're somewhere maybe a remote area. Is that essentially what an innovation zone looks like?

SPEAKER_00 14:54

Yeah, that's about right. I mean, we're trying to find parts of the country where there's not a lot of activity. Obviously, FAA airplanes is a big deal, particularly if you're looking at jamming or if you're looking at anything that could jam GPS, you need to be mindful of that. But historically, you know, one of the things that I've seen leading the FCC is when you're trying to make trade-offs, a lot of times it's hard to weigh one particular policy goal over another. Obviously, we want calls to 911 always to go through. Obviously, we want airplanes to always have reliable connection to GPS. And we always want to make sure that drones are being tested across a wide variety of bands. But there are parts of the country where we can find areas where there's very little risk of a phone call being dropped because you're talking about portions of the Southwest where there's miles and miles of areas with nobody. And then how do you find areas as well where you don't have a significant risk of disruption to aircraft? But that's what we're looking for. There's areas where people can experiment much more quickly, much more broadly on developing drone technology.

SPEAKER_01 15:48

And if we get the regulatory environment right, are you confident that we can scale? Right? There's permitting, of course, is issues, things that may be outside your purview environmental review for manufacturing. But are you confident that the U.S. can scale and meet the directive of these executive orders for U.S. drone dominance, especially because we've, you know, you and the agency and the national security authorities have effectively put out the signal to American industry, to law enforcement across the country, like you got to stop buying foreign-made drones. Like we're gonna, this is an important issue and it's gonna be done here.

SPEAKER_00 16:17

Yeah, I'm very hopeful about the future for a couple of reasons. One, you look at a lot of our foreign adversaries, they're very top-down, they're very command and control. They'll have one or two manufacturers that they're betting everything on. And in some ways, that's not different than how we used to be years ago from a defense procurement perspective. You'd had one or two primes, you know, big contractors, you'd bet everything on, you know, multi-million or multi-billion dollar contracts. But where we're shifting to is a much more nimble system where you have smaller, competitive, upstart companies. I mean, you look at the satellite space in general. I spent time um outside of Los Angeles, uh, an area called uh Elsa Gundo, the Gundo, where you have a lot of smaller uh startups. And that's the future, I think, is yes, we're gonna have the big primes, you know, the major defense contractors, but with drones and otherwise, we are opening up a playing field so that smaller providers can get in and compete. And I think that's gonna unlock a real advantage for us in America.

SPEAKER_01 17:10

So uh switching gears, I guess, literally, to routers, right? Uh another technology that maybe most people take for granted. You either buy your own, you get one from your home internet provider, it just sits in a window, it sits somewhere in a cabinet, you don't think about it at all. Back in March, the FCC's Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau, similar with drones, said that routers produced in a foreign country are going to be added to this covered list. And this, again, implementing a national security determination from the White House that talked about supply chain vulnerabilities that could disrupt the economy, critical infrastructure, cybersecurity risks, uh, because we've seen apparently an increase in state, non-state, malign activity around the vulnerabilities of right small home office routers, maybe folks that don't have the most sophisticated cybersecurity setup and that being exploited to conduct attacks. Now, this covers essentially all consumer grade routers, but uh one of the challenges here, maybe unlike drones, where we are really seeing a lot of activity to build in the US, is that the US really doesn't have significant uh production of Wi-Fi routers. So a lot of folks in the industry they looked at this and they said, well, wait a second, you just banned all foreign-made routers. We don't have any US-based routers. How does that work? How do we ban all foreign-made routers if we don't make any in the United States?

SPEAKER_00 18:35

To your point, routers uh is probably not something that a lot of people think about, but it is ultimately the way that you know almost every American connects to the internet at home is through some sort of router. And there's been a hollowing out of the U.S. industrial base over the last decade plus. What the National Security Agency's determined is that foreign-produced routers pose an unacceptable threat to the U.S. And so we acted based on that and banned all foreign-produced routers. Now, we're actually working through an exception process right now. So if you do have a router that's produced abroad, but it doesn't present a national security threat, then we are creating exceptions to the broad prohibition. And we've issued several of them so far. We're going to continue to do it. I think it makes sense. You know, it's the same thing we did with drones, where you step in immediately with a ban on all foreign-produced, and then you look case by case to see which ones can be brought in. And we'll take into account what can be produced here, what can't. If something needs to be produced here, but it needs some time to shift back to being produced here, we'll take that into account. So I think there's a way to do this that ends up being, you know, nuanced, um, not compromising national security, but not disrupting fundamentally um economic activity here.

SPEAKER_01 19:40

And what are you looking for when you're issuing the exemptions? Are you looking for friend shoring, right? It's maybe not that they they can't produce everything in the US, but they're producing things in countries that are less of a concern from a national security perspective and allies. Or, andor are you looking for companies to make binding commitments to essentially say, look, give us the exemption, but within X number of years, you're gonna see US production in some significant way? How are you evaluating these waiver requests? Because it is a tremendous amount of power that that the agency has to say yes or no to these companies about about bringing their routers in. And I know you're not trying to pick winners and losers, it's about national security. So, how do you evaluate uh these companies as they come to you and ask for waivers, as I imagine most of them have?

SPEAKER_00 20:26

Those are a lot of interesting considerations that you laid out. One answer is that from the FCC's perspective, it's ultimately up to the Department of War and the Department of Homeland Security to make the decision. Then we sort of implement the decision that they make. So all the discussions about the exceptions would go through them. But there are pretty easy calls. So for instance, um, you have firmware or software updates that don't necessarily change anything about the device. You know, ostensibly that could be viewed as a change that would be hit by our cover list, but we're not applying that. There's things like hardware changes. So if you manufacture um a screw abroad and they don't have any more of them, you obviously can shift to another country. So you're looking at sort of the sensitive components of it. And then DHS and Department of War are making broader decisions about the security threat in terms of where the product is specifically being produced.

SPEAKER_01 21:14

So speaking of electronic devices and how they are authorized in the United States, another thing that people might not be aware is that these devices are often tested in labs. I think most, if not all of them, are, to make sure that they operate the way that a company says. You can imagine that a device that says it's going to use Wi-Fi spectrum, and then you turn it on in your house and it turns out it's using some other spectrum that it's not supposed to be, maybe it's interfering with airplanes or whatever, that would be a huge problem, right? So the FCC has these relationships with labs that say, hey, we tested the Bluetooth speaker, the Internet of Things device, whatever. It's good to go. It's certified, it meets the criteria, it does what it says. Now, this kind of blew my mind when when you when you all first started tackling this, but apparently up until The FCC took action, 75% of those labs were in China that US companies or foreign companies, any company really were relying on to get that certification to then get the FCC to approve devices. I mean, some folks describe this as like peak globalization. Um, and the FCC has uh taken action to essentially crack down on what you call bad labs. Aside from just the obvious of the civil military fusion that you talked about, which is that in China, right, it's very difficult to determine is an entity working with the Chinese government, is it effectively controlled by the Chinese government? It's subject to national security law, so at any time, any entity could be. But was there a specific event that really got you all to look at this, like had specific concerns, or just the, oh my God, I can't believe we've been doing this up until now. Like, how did we let this happen? Let's take action.

SPEAKER_00 22:52

As we talked about earlier, there's really no piece of electronics at all that can be used in the US that doesn't go through this FCC equipment authorization procedure. And as you indicated, historically, that was a very technical process. What spectrum band you operate on? What's your power limit? Just basically making sure that the devices aren't gonna needlessly interfere with each other. But over the last several years, as we also talked about, we've been increasing the national security checks that go into devices. So once you put Huawei or DJI on a covered list, you want to make sure that someone's not white labeling those devices and continuing to ship them into the US. So checking for national security issues during the equipment authorization process has taken on vitally new importance. As we started looking at this issue, as you noted, it's something like 75% of all electronics are tested in China. And that could potentially present national security threats if those labs themselves ultimately are not trustworthy. So we started a process at the FCC to kick out labs from our system that are not trustworthy labs because they have ties back to the PLA or their otherwise are untrustworthy. So we have many labs that are now out of the process. It also has an interesting component in terms of onshoring. So we want to make sure that we have the testing capacity here in the US. And a lot of this fundamentally comes down to a point about reciprocity, which I think is a really great starting point and maybe ending point for international relations, where, you know, obviously China's not going to allow a lot of US-made products to go into the country at all. They're certainly not going to take the word of a US-based test lab to allow a product to go in there. So I think reciprocity makes sense. And so this is one where I think it helps with onshoring, it helps with national security. It's also common sense. You don't want to be completely dependent on labs in foreign countries to test all electronics here. And at a similar point, we stood up during the Biden years a process called the U.S. Cyber Trust Mark, where it was similar to an Energy Star program where you could take a IoT device, an Internet of Things device, send it through this process, and it would get stamped as safe from a cybersecurity perspective. Well, the entity that was selected to run the U.S. cyber trustmark proceeding during the Biden years was an entity that had deep uh ties inside of China. And so we raised some concerns about that. That company decided to withdraw from being the administrator, and we've now finalized the process for a new U.S. cyber trustmark administrator that is based in the U.S. and doesn't have any concerning ties back into China.

SPEAKER_01 25:16

Right. And the goal here, when you buy something that says energy star, right? You have, as a consumer, you don't need to know the exact specifics, right? You just know that generally this is an energy efficient product. Same idea here, right? Now you go in your house for better or worse. It's kind of annoying, frankly. But like every single appliance you have is talking to the internet all the time. It's like you're with less connected devices. Your fridge is like beeping and your washing machine has an app to tell you when it's done because apparently you I want to go back to when you had the car and you had to like manually roll down the window, you know?

SPEAKER_00 25:44

Like there's just too many things that have gone digital.

SPEAKER_02 25:47

I'll take the electric window as someone who owned a car with the with the with the wheel down. The hand crank.

SPEAKER_01 25:52

That point was annoying. But uh essentially the goal here, right, is that when a consumer has a fridge or a dishwasher or whatever, they don't we don't need them to be a cybersecurity expert to know it's trustworthy or not. And hopefully if they get the mark, they get the mark. Last thing on devices, because I know that you know we're we're talking a lot about devices, but it's really important. Uh, operation clean carts. So the FCC, even when you sometimes say, okay, this is a prohibited product, right? Huawei and ZTE for years across administrations, there's been bipartisan agreement, like we shouldn't have Huawei phones in the United States, cell phones, we shouldn't have routers, et cetera, other gear. Yet you would still see listings on these massive marketplaces like Amazon, eBay, but even some smaller ones as well, where you could buy this stuff. And this is not an area where you necessarily have a direct regulatory hook. You don't regulate the marketplace, but it seems like there's been some voluntary engagement here. How has that been working with the companies? Did you find that once you raise the issue, they were receptive, or was there some pushback because yes, it's gonna take some money? Of course, they take a cut of every transaction. So there's maybe a financial disincentive to taking down the bad equipment. You know, how did that process go? And even though you don't have a direct hook, did you find it mostly amicable?

SPEAKER_00 27:01

Whenever you take actions to broadly prohibit a device or services, there's always gonna be loopholes that emerge and you got to kind of play a little bit of a game of whack-a-mole for possibly a couple of years. One that we found is once we added these devices to the cover list, you could still go online to uh any one of the large e-commerce sites and search for Huawei or other cover list gear, and you could find it pretty easily. So we reached out to uh a number of the companies that are selling this, and I was actually surprised. Uh, they were very willing to work with us, they were very quick to actually take action. Every single one of the companies that we reached out to put in place new procedures, both automatic procedures and manual check procedures to make sure that they're not selling on their platforms covered list devices. Now, they could have taken a different approach and said, well, Section 230, we're not liable. But I was very impressed, and I believe the numbers now is that millions of listings have come off of e-commerce site for covered list devices that have been determined to pose national security threats. But I've been really pleased at the working relationship we have with those businesses. I'm really glad that they decided that selling prohibited equipment was a bad look.

SPEAKER_02 28:07

Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_01 28:08

So now getting into direct to devices has been a topic you've talked about a ton. You know, this is May 18th. You were talking about that this morning on CNBC. And uh last week, May 12th, the FCC's Wireless Telecommunications Bureau and Space Bureau, you proved these huge transactions involving mid band spectrum, getting back to what I said earlier. This kind of like the Goldilocks spectrum of it can handle a lot of data, it can also travel far enough, right, for next-gen services like 5G or direct to device. And uh it's a $42 billion sale of assets from EchoStar to ATT and SpaceX and to uh Spectrum Transactions. Now, direct to device is something that maybe a consumer is familiar with when they're out of service and there's a little satellite logo in the top right of their cell phone that's essentially for emergencies only. Or if you've signed up for you you pay a monthly fee, you can get kind of texting and calling on your phone wherever you are. And I guess if you're one of those people that thinks hiking is really fun, you're you're in Yellowstone, you really want to text people while you're hiking, you can do that. Uh, but but there's been a lot of writing now that it's going to expand beyond maybe these these niche use cases. Now you've framed this transaction, uh, many have as a potential game changer to really shake up the wireless market. Uh, what what does success look like here now that you've kind of freed up this spectrum for use uh among these carriers by by allowing this sale and the FCC has to approve all these license transfers, which is why you were involved. But now that this transaction has occurred, a lot of money, uh, what are you hoping to see in the market as a result?

SPEAKER_00 29:47

Yeah, as we indicated earlier, I think one of the interesting things about being the chair of the FCC is you get to see the mismatch between the headlines of the day and what really matters. And even though uh we didn't say anything last week uh about Jimmy Kimmel, I think last week was probably uh will go down, in my view, is one of the most consequential weeks of this Trump 47 FCC. And last week we uh approved the sale of Spectrum to two entities, one to ATT, which is lighting it up immediately for faster 5G and 6G services, and two, a big chunk of Spectrum to SpaceX, which they could use for any number of things. But what people are thinking they're gonna use it for is what we call this new direct-to-sell technology. So people are used to, for years, having these satellite dishes and getting really high-speed internet service recently from this new generation of low earth orbit satellites, and people are used to low-quality satellite phones. Well, imagine sort of putting the two of those together where right from your smartphone, wherever you are, you can connect directly to a low earth orbit satellite and get truly high-speed internet anywhere globally. That's amazing for connectivity. It's great for competition, and we actually want multiple different providers to compete in this space, and we're setting things up for that. But again, we had $42 billion transaction, 100 plus megahertz of spectrum. And it was really a encapsulation of our entire approach to spectrum policy and wireless leadership. So for years, we had businesses that would get all the spectrum and effectively sit on the spectrum or at least not put it to its highest and best use. And we've signaled to everybody, you know, now is the time that we need spectrum actually lit up for the benefit of consumers, and we've encouraged providers to do that. So we did that here. We also, again, bet on US leadership in this direct-to-device, direct-to-sell, next gen uh area. And so we're really excited about it. This transaction hits on so many key issues, and it's part of why we're seeing prices down for connectivity services, particularly wireless services. We're seeing speeds up for wireless services. So the policies that we're running are starting to deliver results for consumers, and it's only going to get better as this direct-to-device technology continues to roll out.

SPEAKER_01 31:53

You've seen some analysts and comments from the big three companies like Verizon AT and T Mobile, maybe downplaying the competitive threat that direct-to-device would pose to traditional cell networks, right? They point out and they say, look, it may be great for if you're hiking in a national park, but it's just not the most efficient way of connecting people in an urban or suburban area, maybe even rural areas. Um, and they don't necessarily see it as emerging as like a fourth carrier to compete or a fifth one if you if if you consider cable networks to be the fourth de facto mobile network right now, maybe more of a gap filler. Do you have a view on that? I saw you you made some comments saying you'd be very hesitant against uh betting against Elon Musk. I think I think that's right, because there's been a lot of people betting against him uh going back 20 years and look at what SpaceX is doing now. But just given you know physics, capacity constraints, do you see success as direct-to-device satellite emerging as a fully fledged nationwide carrier option that competes for all Americans? Or is it still success if it's more about filling in these coverage areas, you know, these rural highways, these rural areas that could be good for public safety, it could be good for trucking, it could be good for a lot of things. What are you looking for here? Or is it just not like you're just trying to see what the market does? You're not really concerned about the outcome here.

SPEAKER_00 33:16

Yeah, ultimately success is gonna be whatever consumers, the market, and the technology decide, and not having the FCC be sort of an artificial barrier to that. There is a very active debate right now. You know, is direct-to-device technology going to be a complement to existing mobile wireless networks like Verizon and T-Mobile? Is it gonna be a competitor? I think most people have pretty clear vision right now into where direct-to-device can be meaningful in very rural areas. But there's you know, an active debate about what does it mean in suburban areas, what does it mean in urban areas? I don't know the answer, but I do know that I want to let the market figure that out. And so what we're trying to do, again, is set up multiple different providers to compete in this space. So SpaceX is purchasing Spectrum from EchoStar to launch its direct-to-device product, but Amazon is also getting up and off the ground with their own competitive direct-to-device offering. And they just announced that they're purchasing GlobalStar, which has spectrum assets as well that they could then use for their direct-to-device technology. There's other companies, AST and Lynx that are in this space. So what we've done is we've we've tried to facilitate multiple providers, and we're trying to create lanes where when we came into this job, all these satellite providers were effectively staking claims on each other's spectrum, which made it very difficult for anybody to invest massively the way you need for direct-to-device constellations. And we've come in and said, no, you have your lane over here, you have your lane over here. And so we've been trying to create certainty from a regulatory perspective so that you can see the billions of dollars of investment that you need. And so I think it's a very promising technology, but you know, there's been some technology misses before. So these are big transactions, right?

SPEAKER_01 34:49

$40 billion, Amazon buying Global Star, some number of billions that I don't remember off the top of my head, huge investments in AST's network. A small company might be looking at this and thinking, how can I ever participate in this market? Right. And and while cellular spectrum, terrestrial cellular spectrum has traditionally been auctioned by the FCC, so you have to pay for it anyway, satellite spectrum is not traditionally auctioned. So while there's this huge benefit in the emphasis and the allowance of the FCC on the secondary market because you're lighting up spectrum that may not have been used, a small company might be looking at this and just saying, I don't have $40 billion to buy spectrum from a company or to buy a company outright. Is there any concern that smaller players might not be able to participate in this market? Or how are you thinking about that?

SPEAKER_00 35:37

Well, one, I think scale really matters, you know, for better or worse, um as a as this technology evolves, these are players that are competing against, particularly abroad, national champions that are state-backed. So we need to make sure that the US-based companies have the scale necessary to compete and succeed. It wasn't too long ago uh that the mobile wireless market had, you know, seven, eight, or nine different players. And naturally, that has now sort of moved to three traditional mobile wireless, as you noted, cables getting in the game, direct-to-cells getting in the game as well. But you need some scale. At the same time, the spectrum that uh that Amazon is purchasing at Global Star, that SpaceX is purchasing, is spectrum that was available on the market. And anybody with a good idea could have persuaded any bank to give them the money to make that type of investment. But these are scale plays. When you're talking about literal rocket science, you know, to put rockets into space, to put satellites into orbit. Those are big investments. And so necessarily, if you have thousands of dollars, that's that's gonna be a tough area to compete.

SPEAKER_01 36:34

Yeah, I mean, my idea uh we'll probably not be uh not be seeing uh the light of day. Yeah. Um briefly, there's been a discussion at the FCC and in telecom circles for many years about potentially subsidizing through the Universal Service Program, which subsidizes all sorts of programs uh for rural broadband, for low-income cellular service, for rural hospitals. We won't get into all that, but everyone knows there's dead zones around the country, right? Usually in rural areas. And one of the proposals that have been floating around the FCC for many years was this 5G fund where the agency would fund essentially the deployment of macrocellular towers all around rural America to plug these gaps. Now, based on what you've just laid out, there could potentially be three competitors in the market that can offer that gap filler, essentially, assuming they partner with the big three, right? So that your phone seamlessly goes from the terrestrial network to the satellite and back. Assuming that all happens, does that get rid of the need to potentially subsidize this cellular infrastructure? Should policymakers be rethinking those old proposals, maybe scrapping them and saying this problem is going to be solved by direct to sell?

SPEAKER_00 37:47

Well, to your point, there is a lot of federal subsidies out there for internet connectivity right now. As you indicate, there's one program that's administered by the FCC called the Universal Service Fund. It's a $9 billion a year program. It's paid through by an assessment, feels like a tax, but an assessment on your cell phone bill. So thanks for contributing to that. Every month. Exactly. But separately, we've got a $42 billion program that's being run out of the Department of Commerce called Bede. Famously, the Biden administration stood that program up, but there was a bit of a failure to launch. Uh, Vice President Harris was put in charge of that program. And after, I don't know, many thousands of days, there wasn't a single person connected, not a single shovel's worth of dirt was even turned. That's now changing. President Trump has come in, Secretary uh Lutnick, Administrator Roth, uh, all at Commerce Department have revamped that program. And now we are seeing dirt starting to turn. And so when you think of the future of these connectivity programs, we want to see where does that $42 billion go? How far is the $9 billion that we're going? How do these new technologies help? I think that's a conversation we should have. I don't think anybody's talking about an immediate flash cut change. These are nuanced discussions, but it's a conversation worth having at the FCC.

SPEAKER_01 38:56

One of the defining characteristics of your time as a commissioner and your time as a chairman has been your visiting with the wireless tower workers, not just the tower workers, but uh workers that splice fiber, that that construct the towers, et cetera, but a lot of tower climbing, and you've done that, right? And uh you've done it many times. And maybe some people think it's just like a hobby that you really like doing. But um, as someone who's traveled with you to these places, you talked to you talk to the tower constructors. You learned a lot about their challenges. And I think we've seen a manifestation of that knowledge in some of the actions that you've taken as chairman. So you have uh mergers that came through your desk that the FCC had to approve. And maybe from a traditional kind of libertarian conservative lens, some of this stuff looks unorthodox from a from a doctrinaire kind of viewpoint. But you had Verizon Frontier, you had T-Mobile US Cellular, these transactions, and you secured worker protections in these mergers as a condition of their approval. Yeah, one, is this something that do you think had you not spent all that time on the road with these tower workers, that this issue would have been on your mind all these years later after your first tower climb to do this? And then uh after that, I want to ask you about the the political implications of a Republican FCC engaging in this. But that first question of you know, do you think these deals have these conditions but for that knowledge that you gained on the road?

SPEAKER_00 40:19

Well, like America's tower climbers and telecom workers, they're the best of the best. These are just salt of the earth people. They're on the road, you know, more days than you can count. They're staying in hotels, uh, oftentimes they're staying in campsites near the facilities that they're building, and they're just the best of the best. And I, to your point, I've spent a lot of time on the road with them. And I think it can't help but change how you think about and approach these issues. And I, you know, recently I was on a tower climb a couple weeks ago down in North Carolina, did a 2,000-foot broadcast tower when you're up there. 2,000 feet, the wind is blowing. Um, you know, it's a pretty intimidating circumstance to be in. For me, uh, I just have to slowly turn my brain off and sort of stop processing information. Once, you know, I you can't look down 2,000 feet. Most people assume that's what I do every day when I go to the office, which is turn my brain off. Uh, but I particularly had to do it in that circumstance. But we have brought it to the core of our work at the agency. As we've looked at these major transactions, we have made sure that the merging parties are looking out for the American worker. And we make sure that they're making sure that you know wages are appropriate for the type of work that they're doing, that there's safety requirements in place. You don't have foreign fly-by-night crews swooping in and undercutting pricing for other crews. So I don't think we would have been doing this if I hadn't spent such time with them and really had it on my radar. But I do think it's it's helping to deliver results for the American worker.

SPEAKER_01 41:38

So you've been working in policy long enough to see this, right, the shift in the party, right? There, you know, 15 years ago, I think it'd be fair to say you wouldn't really see Republican officials talking about labor protections in the context of a merger, right? That this is a this is a different situation. And whether it's this or some of the media issues or or even the routers actions that you've taken or drones or concerning yourself with the onshoring of there's a call center thing, we don't have to belabor that. But there's a lot that you've done that that is maybe outside of the traditional lens of I'm a Republican, I get into office or I get into a regulatory position, and I'm just gonna cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, and then the market will do what it does. And I'm not really gonna concern myself with with outcomes and things like labor issues. And you've seen this shift, you're a manifestation of that shift. You've also, I'm sure, seen pushback, right, from the companies. Of course, they file on the record this is overreach, et cetera. Um, maybe some of the more doctrinaire voices on the right have said this is too much, the agency shouldn't be uh intervening in situations like this. Some have even called for the SEC to be abolished, to which I say, who's gonna manage the interference? But um, maybe they think everything but the wireless bureau can be abolished. Uh and when you see that pushback, what do you think about it if you think about it at all? Maybe this is the Don Draper meme. I don't think about you at all. But um, do you, as someone who's been in the policy space for this shift, right? You've seen it happen, you've been a part of it. How do you think about your tenure and these criticisms, critiques, even observations from folks who look at it and say, wow, like a Republican FCC is securing labor protections in a merger like that would just not have happened 10 to 15 years ago. How do you think about that?

SPEAKER_00 43:19

I think that we've done more to build bipartisan consensus to eliminate the FCC than AEI or any sort of libertarian organization has ever accomplished, uh, even if you gave them a legion of uh fedoras to try to accomplish their goal. But ultimately for me, I think it it flows from President Trump. And we have our North stars politically and policy wise. And ultimately, in every single circumstance, President Trump, my understanding is he wants the best deal possible for the country. And I think that's the mentality that we bring. There's a lot of stuff that we do that is very deregulatory. You know, we, as you indicated, we're running this proceeding called delete, delete, delete. We've eliminated more rules and regulations, probably than every any FCC in. History. I think it's something like 130,000 words we've eliminated from our code of federal regulation. Hundreds of pages from the CFR have been eliminated. In terms of the FCC's own size itself, we're down to the lowest level of FCC employees since, I believe, 1957. So we're running a really aggressive deregulatory agenda. At the same time, there's areas where there is appropriate levels of regulation. I think you see it in some of the transactions we've done, that you see it in a lot of the public safety, national security, that you see it in some of the media policy space. So we have a little bit of regulatory actions. We have a lot of deregulation. You put the two together and we're just trying to make telecom policy great again.

SPEAKER_01 44:39

So because we are sponsored by a bipartisan organization, I have to ask, right? There's this disconnect between maybe the press coverage of the FCC and how many issues you're working on and some of the significance of the issues of national security. Does that disconnect also translate to your relationship with the Democratic Commissioner Anna Gomez, right? Because if you read the media, she is highly critical of your media policy. But a lot of the things that we've talked about in this episode have been unanimous votes or things that have been bipartisan across administrations. How is your relationship with Anna Gomez? And what do you think maybe the media are missing about that as well?

SPEAKER_00 45:14

Well, I think we have really good relationships across the FCC. As you know, the FCC is an agency that's authorized for five commissioners. We have three right now, myself and a Republican commissioner trustee. She's doing phenomenal work, including the leadership that she's has shown on a lot of the international issues. And Commissioner Gomez, who's a Democrat, and the three of us get together. We meet individually, uh, at least once a month, if not often. They're very cordial. There's no food being thrown at any of those meetings. And to your point, the vast, vast majority of what we do is bipartisan and it's unanimous. There's a couple of issues where people disagree, and that's always been the case at the FCC, but we continue to talk. We, you know, we get up the next day. If we didn't agree on something, we see where we can find common ground on the next thing. It's pretty par for the course for how the agency has always operated.

SPEAKER_01 45:55

We're almost halfway through the year. What are you hoping to get done by the end of this year? What are issues that people should be looking out for at FCC.gov or at Brendan Carr FCC on X? Uh what are what are you excited about?

SPEAKER_00 46:07

The big thing that we're running is we're running a build America agenda. So the first piece of that is restoring U.S. leadership in wireless. And we're running a two-part play there. One is this thing called spectrum auctions. So in order to get spectrum that Verizon or AT or T-Mobile or any other company can use, we have to sell it at the federal government called an auction. And we've gone about four years without an auction of spectrum, which is almost unprecedented. And with so much data demand out there right now, there was a real risk that we weren't gonna have the spectrum necessary to carry all the data, whether it's mobile AI or otherwise. So we're gonna have the first spectrum auction in four years coming up this summer. Next year, we're gonna have a big spectrum auction called the Upper C BAN, which will raise many billions of dollars. And then hopefully we're gonna have multiple auctions in 28 as well. So making sure that all of that takes place on time, on schedule has been a big work stream for the FCC. The space economy is big for us as well. We're doing a lot to accelerate our work so we can have all these low Earth orbit satellites coming up there. We're fundamentally reorganizing and reshaping the work of the FCC's Space Bureau, again, just to go much faster and operate like an assembly line. So I think getting those spectrum auctions up and across the finish line, finishing the modernization of the Space Bureau, all of that is gonna be key to our Build America agenda.

SPEAKER_02 47:21

All right, last question before I let you go. If you were trapped on an island and you had to watch one late night television show until the rest of your days, which one would it be?

SPEAKER_00 47:29

That's a good question. So uh right now in our household, we're watching Beast Games. So Mr. Beast is now in the second season of these, you know, Beast games. It's sort of a survivor style competition where a hundred people go in and then the last person has a shot to get five million dollars. We're watching that right now. It's pretty interesting and pretty entertaining.

SPEAKER_02 47:46

Okay, so not the traditional 1135 uh, you know, studio talk show style. I see. I see, I see ya.

SPEAKER_01 47:52

Well, uh, thank you so much again. Happy that you were willing to uh poke your head up for this interview. Really appreciate it. Yeah, glad to do it. Thanks. Center Edge is sponsored by Digital Progress Institute, a bipartisan technology policy think tank based in Washington, D.C. This podcast is produced by Vulgate Media. You can find it and subscribe in Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Please leave us a review. It will help others find the show. You can email me at Evanetcorepointstrategies.com with any feedback or ideas for shows. Otherwise, we'll catch you next time.