Federal Communications Chairman Brendan Carr joined Hugh to discuss the FCC’s new “Council on National Security”: The post FCC Chairman Brendan Carr On FCC’s New Council for National Security appeared first on The Hugh Hewitt Show.
Federal Communications Chairman Brendan Carr joined Hugh to discuss the FCC’s new “Council on National Security”:
Audio:
Transcript:
HH: Out of my sick bed, because I didn’t want to miss this interview. I’m so pleased to welcome FCC Chairman Brendan Carr to the program. I do that with a couple of mental reservations, Mr. Chairman. Welcome, good to have you here.
BC: Yeah, good to be with you. Thanks so much for having me on. Been a huge fan of your show over the years. It’s really wonderful to be with you.
HH: Well, my mental reservation is that you’re an Ajit Pai protégé, and he’s a Kansas City Chiefs guy. And I always thought he put his thumb on the scale for the Chiefs against the Browns. Will you commit to net neutrality vis-à-vis the Browns so that we’re on the air more?
BC: Exactly. You know, fair and equal treatment for everybody. I’m fully committed to it. I’m with you.
HH: All right. Let’s get to the important story. And when they said you were available, I did come in. I wasn’t going to come in today. But I think your Council for National Security within the agency is maybe the most important thing the FCC has done since it actually got stood up. So would you explain to people, and we’ve got Steelers fans listening, so let’s go slow. Let’s explain to them what the FCC does, and what the Council for National Security is intended to do.
BC: Yeah, there’s a lot of work that the FCC does, but one of the most important as you indicated is that Congress established us to help promote national security. And this is something that actually in the first Trump administration, President Trump once again saw around the corner in particular with respect to China and the CCP. And he took sort of early definitive action on Huawei and ZTE, effectively spy gear that we had allowed to infiltrate out networks. And right now, China is taking efforts across hundreds and hundreds of technology sectors. We took good action on Huawei. That’s great. We moved on ZTE, China Mobile, China Telecom. But we have to be extremely vigilant against all the threats. And so we’ve borrowed a lot of this gear from our networks, but we’re finding that the CCP is sort of white labeling their devices. They’re standing up shell companies. And so what we’ve done now is we’ve stood up a new council within the FCC that’s going to reach across all of our bureaus. So public safety, wire line, wireless, media bureau, and we’re going to make sure that we’re working together to protect our national security.
HH: Now I am mostly concerned, I’m concerned with it all. Keith Krach is a friend of mine. And when they set up the clean technology initiative in Trump I at State, I was very happy. I’m not sure what happened during the regency of Joe Biden, or whoever was running the place. I don’t know. But we’ve got, we’ve got an actual ownership issue which goes to something Senator Cotton wrote in his new book, Seven Things You Can’t Say About China. Most of our news networks, with the exception of the Fox News Channel, are owned by Hollywood companies that are heavily dependent upon revenue from China. Will the Council for National Security be looking into the influence issues, if not outright ownership issues through shell corporations and third-party shareholders of these production companies that own our news channels?
BC: Yeah, 100%. And look, there’s been concerns raised in particular, including by Senator Cotton, in one transaction in particular that’s now before the FCC – CBS. There’s been some concern raised about potential CCP or Chinese money there. We take that seriously. We’re going to take a look at it. But in general, we’re going to look at all these issues. So as a threshold matter, if in fact you’re a foreign government, you can’t have a broadcast license in the FCC. But there are entities that are tied to these foreign governments that are making investments. And historically, the FCC has been pretty permissive there. I can assure you that we are not going to be as permissive this go-round. We’re going to look at the national security issues. And in fact, one transaction in particular, when George Soros went out and bought 200-plus radio stations and got a special shortcut from the FCC to do it right before the election, one thing they skipped was the national security review of the foreign financial assets that were being used to make that purchase. So soup to nuts, we’re going to require a lot more disclosure of ties to foreign entities. In fact, we’ve taken some steps there already, and we’re going to take a close look at this foreign funding within our broadcast media.
HH: In regards to that disclosure, I’m not, I’m syndicated by a bunch of people, but Salem is my principal syndicator. They were outbid by the Soros bid. That’s not why I brought you on. I just want to disclose that so people understand…
BC: Yeah.
HH: Yeah, I hated that thing. I think there’s dark money involved in that. I don’t know where that money’s coming from, and I don’t know what their plan is, but they’re buying up all sorts of AM radio stations, and it’s not for the good of the republic, in my humble opinion. I don’t think they’re CCP spies. But I would not, I mean, the CCP is very good at this stuff. I’ve been doing this for more than 10 years, and actually going back to DOJ in 1984. The bad guys are very good at manipulating the open society to attack us by ownership. And I mean, do you have skilled people? Do you have folks who actually know how to go look for them?
BC: Yeah, at the bare minimum to your point, we have to have transparency. And we’ve actually been working, actually including during the Biden years, we put new disclosure obligations in place. So if broadcasters are running sponsored programming, they need to be much more transparent about the source of foreign funding that goes into that. And so this is going to be an important vertical for us, both the ownership side and otherwise making sure there’s much more transparency and disclosures when it comes to these issues.
HH: Now the way I see this is the Council for National Security only includes FCC employees, so you don’t have any Federal Advisory Committee Act or OPM issues there. You’re just using existing people, am I right about that, Mr. Chairman?
BC: That’s right. Yeah, we’re operating here, obviously in light of President Trump’s direction that every single agency delivered great results, but do so efficiently. So this is bringing together existing components of the agency that are already in the building. Now we will interact with our counterparts across government, including the NSC itself over within the White House, including Team Telecom at DOJ. But this is gathering internal FCC resources. And you know, as a separate matter, we are sort of moving much more efficiently here in getting rid of excessive contracts, and we’re working on our own internal DOGE team. The actual DOGE team will be coming to the FCC in the near future as well. And so we welcome the chance to be sort of efficient in how we deliver results.
HH: Now you’re a great Catholic University lawyer, so you know we have to be viewpoint neutral and content neutral when it comes to the exploration of what the national security product is from our news networks and broadcast facilities. But are you afraid to look, because for many, many years after the McCarthy era, America was afraid to look at content and whether or not they were covering stuff. But we’ve seen China just lay the heavy hand on the NBA, on Universal, on all sorts of movie production studios. I’m sure they’re doing what they can to lay the heavy hand on. Are we afraid to look, or do you have courageous people at the Commission that will go and look for that sort of untoward influence?
BC: Yeah, I think sunlight is the best disinfectant, and so we’re going to take a hard look at that. The person I brought in to specifically run the FCC Security Council used to work on the China Select Committee. So he’s really steeped in these issues, understands the complexity and what we need to get done. But as a general matter, if you look at the FCC, you know, every single broadcaster out there, whether they’re radio or TV, they have a special right. They have this ability to use a scarce national resource, the airwaves. It’s limited. Not everybody gets to do it. You get a license from us to do it. But the bargain there is you’re supposed to operate in the public interest. And for decades, the FCC, frankly on a bipartisan basis, walked away from any sense of enforcing the public interest standard. And that’s one thing that we’re reinvigorating at the FCC, and making sure that local broadcasters know they have to serve their community. Because if you step back, think about it this way. The trust in media right now is at an all-time low. But that’s really about the national news media, whether it’s ABC, NBC, CBS. People actually like their local TV broadcast station, their local radio station. And so one of the biggest things I’m doing as a policy matter is I’m having the backs of local broadcasters when they are pushing back on some of that Hollywood and New York programming that’s being shoved down their throats. But I’m also making sure those local broadcasters know that they have the public interest obligation. We’re going to be watching at the FCC to make sure they do the right thing.
HH: Now Mr. Chairman, we have a quarter million Chinese nationals in the United States on student visas. We have more on LPR’s – green cards. Do you think there ought to be any kind of review of such people before they work for media and technology companies, because the intellectual property theft, as well as the espionage, is overwhelming. It’s much larger than it was in the Soviet era. Much, much larger.
BC: Yeah, of course. And we have that on all sorts of other portions of our industry. I was actually at Columbia University last year when some of these pro-Palestine protests were taking place. And I was helping people understand look, there’s a distinction between your free speech rights and your conduct that you engage in, including occupying some of the classrooms that folks there were engaged in. But when we have sensitive fields that people are going to, of course we need to have responsible vetting before we let people in.
HH: All right, let me move to part two of the new council, which is to upgrade our ability to detect vulnerabilities to surveillance, espionage, and cyberattacks. Amen. And I teach law students. I make them take TikTok off their phone. I told them you cannot get DeepSeek. We’re just not going to have spies in the classroom, and you shouldn’t have spies in your house. What else can the FCC do to let people know about this? They’re just, you’ve got a minute. We’ve got to go to a break.
BC: Yeah, look, we’ve got to get going on this. I mean, Salt Typhoon was one of the most massive cyber intrusions we’ve ever had. When I went into the SCIF, the secure facility, and got a briefing on this, I came out, I just felt like smashing my phone on the ground. It just felt like the depth of penetration that the CCP has achieved here is something that never should have happened. And so that’s something that we need to take a look at – working with carriers, patching these backdoors, these other problems that we’ve identified. That’s going to be a big lift for the council, but we’re going to do it.
HH: Okay, I’m going to come right back with Chairman Carr. He is the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, and he has stood up, in one of the most important initiatives of the new Trump administration, the Council for National Security within the FCC. Bravo to him. If you want to know why, just go get Cotton’s book, Seven Things You Can’t Say About China. There’s an entire chapter. But there’s one part that I haven’t gotten to, yet, that we’re going to talk about, staying ahead in technology. And it’s up to the FCC to help. Stay tuned.
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HH: Many, many initiatives, I could talk to him all day about these initiatives. The Religious Freedom initiative is important to me. But I’m focused like a laser on China and the threat they pose to our telecommunications industry. Mr. Chairman, I am a dummy on the debate between the Department of Defense and the FCC over the spectrum GHz range 1-6. All right, so I don’t know anything, and I don’t pretend to know anything. And I have no opinion on it. All I want to know is that we’re staying ahead of the ChiComs when it comes to the critical technologies – 5G, 6G, artificial intelligence, satellite, space, quantum robotics, autonomous systems, and the internet of things. How does the FCC help do that without screwing up the marketplace, but also keeping China out? It’s a really difficult mission.
BC: Yeah, look, and thankfully, you know, the real leader in this space right now is Chairman Ted Cruz. He’s on Senate Commerce Committee. He’s leading the way to make sure that America has the spectrum resources, as you indicated, to not just compete with China, but make sure that investment flows here, that we bridge the digital divide. Here’s the reality. During the first Trump administration, we fell behind China on the availability of spectrum. This is when 5G was just coming online. And if we had allowed that to happen, they would have just dominated the technology sector. But President Trump stepped in, turned things around. We freed up more spectrum, more of these airwaves for 5G, than any other country. And you know, we flipped the script. Now flash forward to four years under President Biden, and the country just fell into a deep malaise when it came to one of the most important, you know, vectors of our economy strength and national security, which is spectrum. China has just outpaced us the last five years when it comes to freeing up the airwaves. That means they control the standard-setting bodies. That means the investment is going to flow to them. That means the spectrum that they want to use won’t be for us.
HH: Can we stop for a second, Mr. Chairman? Again, let’s think about the Steelers fans. You say spectrum, and they think about a crystal with a light going through it.
BC: Yeah.
HH: What do you mean by saying they control the spectrum?
BC: Yeah, so take your smart phone, for instance. If you want all the data you need to stream videos, to do AR/VR, to do AI, if you want ChatGPT to work on your phone, you need a lot of capacity going to your phone. And spectrum airwaves is effectively like the fiber or the cable to your house that’s invisible, and it’s how you get your phone to download all those videos much more quickly. And we have fallen behind China with respect to the amount of that spectrum that can be used for wireless services right to your phone. And so the innovations that take place, the technologies that can be developed, they’re going to go to the countries that have freed up the amount of spectrum, airwaves needed to power those wireless innovations. So we got sort of walked down a cul-de-sac by President Biden where China jumped out to hundreds of megahertz of spectrum lead on us. And we’ve got to turn that around. That’s what Chairman Cruz is working really hard on.
HH: Well, tell me how that would work. If we made more spectrum available to the private sector, could we keep China out of it while licensing it to American companies to use to innovate in the area of communications, quantum, and AI?
BC: Yeah. I mean, just to throw out a number, so for instance, let’s say we have, you know, 200 megahertz, it’s a unit of measurement of spectrum, and China now has 1,200 megahertz of spectrum available. And so AI is going to develop their faster. It’s also going to have cheaper prices for cellphone service. When we have more spectrum, you can get high-speed internet right to your home without need to get a cable or a fiber. You can get it over the air from a cellphone provider. So it makes a very big difference in terms of prices and competition. But again, national security, if we’re sort of in this posture where China’s leading on 6G and AI, then we’re going to be a really difficult position. You noted DOD. DOD has their own spectrum needs, right? They have radar systems and sensitive systems. So we’ve got to make sure that they have the access to spectrum they need to do their job. But there’s still a lot more spectrum we can free up to use for smartphones or in-home broadband, and that’s going to be vital to our economy.
HH: Last question, Mr. Chairman. This is kind of into the weeds, but it matters a great deal. A lot of people of my generation, and I knew Dick Wiley when he set up your old law firm, Wiley Rein. Fred Fielding was my boss at the White House in the bad old days.
BC: Yeah.
HH: The lawyers of then do not have the abilities that are necessary today to deal with the technologies of tomorrow. Do you have the hiring ability and the capacity to bring into the FCC the modern tech lawyers who are coming out of places that specialize in this, whose national security credentials cannot be questioned to supplement the standing staff at the FCC to get us ready for the 22nd Century?
BC: Yeah, we’re in a great position right now. Like I said, I hired in people to report directly to me, the first ever direct report that’s a national security advisor. We have experts on spectrum. We’ve got a great group coming in, and frankly, we’re just following President Trump’s lead. You know, most people come to D.C. They hope to turn the ship of government one degree here, two degrees there. But President Trump is fundamentally flipped the script, and he’s moving aggressively…
HH: Oh, I guess the FCC got mad. There, you’re back. He’s moving aggressively. I thought maybe the ChiComs got to you.
BC: Yeah, we’re, exactly. We’re moving aggressively with a ton of speed right now, and we’re going to get it done. And it’s, you know, really thanks to President Trump’s leadership.
HH: Chairman Carr, please keep coming back. You’ve got a great, by the way, communications team. Whoever you put in charge of that…
BC: Thank you.
HH: They’re doing a great job. I look forward to many conversations with you, and congratulations on the Council. This is a big deal. Next time, we’ll talk religious expression and religious freedom. I appreciate your time today.
BC: Look forward to it. Thanks, Hugh. Appreciate it.
HH: Thank you, Chairman.
End of interview.
The post FCC Chairman Brendan Carr On FCC’s New Council for National Security appeared first on The Hugh Hewitt Show.
