Brendan Carr wants to focus on 3 things – including a TikTok ban – as Trump's FCC chair

President-elect Donald Trump has tapped Brendan Carr to lead the Federal Communications Commission, the agency that regulates television, radio, wire, satellite and cable across the United States. The former president originally appointed him as a commissioner of the FCC in 2017.

As the top Republican at the FCC, Carr was widely expected to receive the job. But as one of the authors of Project 2025, the 900-page "presidential transition project" released by the Heritage Foundation, we have clear window into his future plans for the agency.

Here are three objectives Carr hopes to accomplish as Trump’s incoming FCC chair.

Limiting Big Tech

One hour after thanking the president for his appointment, Carr made a declaration on X: “We must dismantle the censorship cartel and restore free speech rights for everyday Americans.”

What does it mean to take down the “censorship cartel?” For Carr, much of his criticism of Big Tech focuses on Facebook, Google and YouTube’s content moderation policies. In his Project 2025 chapter, he argues that these companies unfairly censor and demonetize conservative voices.

“The FCC has an important role to play in addressing the threats to individual liberty posed by corporations that are abusing dominant positions in the market,” Carr wrote. “Nowhere is that clearer than when it comes to Big Tech and its attempts to drive diverse political viewpoints from the digital town square.”

Over the years, these privately owned media companies have chosen to remove certain users from their platforms. Many of the banned accounts posted disinformation, conspiracy theories and violence.

It’s worth noting, however, that that ban on X, formerly Twitter, didn’t last, according to an analysis by the Anti-Defamation League. When Elon Musk took over in 2022, hundreds of white nationalist and pro-Nazi accounts were reinstated despite the company’s own hateful conduct policy.

To address these “threats” to free speech, Carr proposes scraping Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which grants immunity to tech companies that moderate user-generated content.

“Congress should do so by ensuring that Internet companies no longer have carte blanche to censor protected speech while maintaining their Section 230 protections,” Carr wrote in Project 2025.

Banning TikTok

In his chapter of Project 2025, Carr argues that during Trump’s first term in office, the administration took a hard stance against Chinese tech companies to protect the United States from the Chinese Communist Party. He hopes to further limit China’s reach by further regulating their tech companies' access to U.S. markets.

Among other measures, Carr supports banning TikTok, claiming that it poses a national security threat, although the president-elect joined the popular social media platform in June. He writes in Project 2025 that the app “provides Beijing with an opportunity to run a foreign influence campaign by determining the news and information that the app feeds to millions of Americans."

Politicians on both sides of the aisle have said that the app’s parent company, ByteDance, is operated by the Chinese government.

An investigation by PolitiFact found that claim to be false. Its U.S. user data is also stored exclusively in the United States, TikTok said, and it cannot be turned over to the Chinese government. The user data is likewise protected by a U.S.-based security team.

Supporting Elon Musk’s Starlink technology

Carr wants to support Musk's Starlink, a satellite constellation that provides internet coverage to over 100 countries. StarLink is a subsidiary of aerospace company SpaceX.

He says in Project 2025 that the FCC should expedite its review and approval of satellites from Starlink and the Amazon-owned Kuiper, arguing that doing so would “significantly accelerate efforts to end the digital divide and disrupt the federal regulatory and subsidy regime.”

Melissa Cruz is an elections reporting fellow who focuses on voter access issues for the USA TODAY Network. You can reach her at [email protected] or on X, formerly Twitter, at @MelissaWrites22.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Trump's FCC chair, a Project 2025 author, supports TikTok ban