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Carr Testifies at Senate Commerce FCC Oversight Hearing, Dec. 17, 2025

December 17, 2025 · CommerceRepublicans · 3:01:00

Embedded from the source channel — never re-uploaded. Watch on YouTube

What happened

Brendan Carr testified on December 17, 2025, alongside Commissioners Olivia Trusty and Anna Gomez at the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation’s oversight hearing on the Federal Communications Commission, carried in full on the committee’s own channel. It was the committee’s first FCC oversight hearing with all commissioners present since June 24, 2020, as the committee’s announcement noted, and Carr’s first appearance before Congress since his September 2025 comments about ABC and Jimmy Kimmel.

The hearing’s defining exchange came when Senator Ben Ray Luján pressed Carr on whether the FCC is an independent agency, holding up the commission’s own website, which described it as “an independent U.S. government agency overseen by Congress.” Carr answered: “The FCC is not an independent agency, formally speaking,” as Poynter reported. Within minutes, the word “independent” had been removed from the FCC’s website, a change Axios’s Sara Fischer first noticed. Commissioner Trusty agreed the commissioners are not independent because they lack for-cause removal protection; Commissioner Gomez answered that the FCC is independent and added, “We should be,” according to Broadband Breakfast’s report of the hearing.

Senator Ed Markey told Carr, “You are now the chairman of the Federal Censorship Commission,” and pressed him on his September statement that broadcasters could handle the Kimmel matter “the easy way or the hard way,” asking whether he regretted it; Carr responded that his job, first and foremost, is to enforce the law, as Fox News’s account of the hearing recorded. Carr defended the commission’s enforcement of the public interest standard, the broadcast hoax rule, and the news distortion policy, telling Senator Gary Peters, as NPR reported, that “the Supreme Court has expressly said there is no First Amendment right to an FCC license.” Senator Jacky Rosen asked Carr to commit to investigating Fox News over an edited Trump interview touching on the Epstein files; Carr answered, “No,” according to Senator Rosen’s office. On substance, Carr told the committee the FCC is building an 800-megahertz spectrum pipeline under its restored auction authority, including up to 180 megahertz in the upper C-band, against a statutory July 2027 deadline, as the hearing summary recorded. Committee Chairman Ted Cruz had criticized Carr’s Kimmel comments in September as “dangerous as hell,” as Reuters reported at the time.

Why it matters

This hearing is the centerpiece of Carr’s oversight record: the session where the independence question was answered on camera and the agency’s own website changed in real time to match the answer. It fixes, in one sitting, the three positions his chairmanship will be judged against — the FCC as an executive agency under the President rather than an independent body, the public interest standard as a live enforcement tool against licensees, and the 800-megahertz pipeline with its July 2027 C-band deadline.

Scoreboard watch

This is a candidate item for the weekly scoreboard: Carr’s December 17, 2025 testimony that the FCC is “not an independent agency, formally speaking,” and his stated plan to auction up to 180 megahertz of upper C-band spectrum by the statutory July 2027 deadline — each as stated at the hearing, to be checked against the commission’s posture and auction calendar.

Sources: Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, “Oversight of the Federal Communications Commission,” December 17, 2025 (full hearing on the committee’s channel, embedded above); Poynter, December 2025, on the independence exchange and the FCC website change; Broadband Breakfast, December 17, 2025; NPR, December 17, 2025; Reuters, December 2025. All figures and characterizations as stated by Mr. Carr, his fellow commissioners, and committee members at the hearing.