Tag Archive for: brendan carr

Another Major Corporation Bends The Knee To Trump

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T-Mobile agreed to kill off its Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) policies, joining Verizon in compliance with the Trump administration.

Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Brendan Carr publicized a letter sent to the FCC on Wednesday. The filing announces that ‘T-Mobile will no longer have any individual roles or teams focused on DEI.”

The letter, signed by Mark Nelson, T-Mobile’s executive vice president and general counsel, also claims that the company “has removed references to DEI or ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ from its employee training materials  and will ensure that all future training materials are focused on achieving the company’s core business objectives and anti-discrimination instruction, without reference to separate DEI objectives.”

T-Mobile did not respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

Carr called T-Mobile’s decision to ditch DEI “another good step forward for equal opportunity, nondiscrimination, and the public interest.”

“A big victory for @BrendanCarrFCC — @TMobile is a German company, pushing far-left EU politics in America,” Consumers Research Executive Director, Will Hild said on X. “This should *never* be tolerated and I’m glad Chairman Carr is ensuring they’re ditching their woke European ways in America.”

T-Mobile’s letter follows Verizon’s May announcement of an end to its corporate DEI, “effective immediately.” The company erased DEI “not just in name or in the way [it is] described, but in substance,” following a February letter from Carr, questioning Verizon’s continued promotion of DEI.

Verizon’s chief legal officer, Vendana Venkatesh, claimed in the May letter to Carr that “Verizon is making these changes to its practices not just in name or in the way they are described, but in substance.”

FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez, however, calls this move by T-Mobile a “cynical bid to win FCC regulatory approval,” where the company makes “a mockery of its professed commitment to eliminating discrimination, promoting fairness, and amplifying underrepresented voices.”

President Donald Trump has made efforts since he entered office to cut DEI out of the workforce and out of schools via 2025 executive orders, including an order directing the Labor Department to remove affirmative action terms from federal contracts with an April 20 deadline.

AUTHOR

Daisy Roser

Contributor

RELATED ARTICLE: Trump Admin Ends Biden DEI Mandates For Transportation Funding

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All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

EXCLUSIVE: FCC Commissioner Wants Regulatory ‘Cows’ Lined Up ‘For The Slaughterhouse’

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Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Commissioner Nathan Simington outlined the regulatory “cows” his agency is “lining up for the slaughterhouse” as part of its “Delete, Delete, Delete” initiative, in an interview with the Daily Caller News Foundation.

The Trump-era deregulatory push, spearheaded by the commissioner and FCC Chair Brendan Carr, targets what Simington described as outdated broadcast media regulations — rules from the Truman administration that no longer reflect the media landscape in 2025.

“Let’s talk about profane cows, because these are the ones that we’re lining up for the slaughterhouse,” Simington told the DCNF. “I think one of the prime areas of interest for ‘Delete, Delete, Delete’ should be our broadcast media regulations. These broadcast media regulations, in many cases, come — you were talking about the Truman administration — some of them are just that old. Others are from the 1970s. They’re from an era when broadcast media was the only form of telecom media that most people had access to. Obviously, that has changed radically.”

WATCH:

The “Delete, Delete, Delete” initiative, launched in March, invites the public to flag FCC rules they believe should be scrapped. The aim, according to Simington, is to modernize the Commission’s rulebook by gutting what he called “path dependen[t]” relics from a pre-streaming era.

“In 2023, streaming subscriptions surpassed cable subscriptions in the United States, and broadcasters are not in the same kind of economic and cultural positions that they once were,” he said. “So, the idea that [broadcasters] should still be as intensely regulated as they were during that era — even if you are a believer in media regulation, which I’m not, particularly — but even if you were, the argument isn’t there anymore. There really is no argument other than path dependence and historical practice.”

The FCC is considering cuts to longstanding media ownership caps, operational restrictions and decades-old filing requirements — unless they’re explicitly mandated by Congress or the White House. Simington said that unless the president “wants it to stay,” it should be up for deletion.

“I think we should take a hard look at every media ownership rule, at every operational restriction,” the commissioner said. “And unless it’s something that’s been directly mandated by Congress, or where we have clear direction from the West Wing, that the president wants it to stay, we should consider deleting, deleting, deleting it.”

AUTHOR

Thomas English

DCNF Technology Reporter.

RELATED ARTICLE: EXCLUSIVE: Massive Telecom Merger Champions Workers In A Way Biden Admin Never Could, FCC Chair Says

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

EXCLUSIVE: Massive Telecom Merger Champions Workers In A Way Biden Admin Never Could, FCC Chair Says

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The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) greenlit Verizon’s $20 billion acquisition of Frontier Communications on Friday — but only after Chairman Brendan Carr insisted on a slate of labor protections he said there was “no way” the Biden administration would have pursued.

The deal requires Verizon to adopt sweeping reforms benefitting tower climbers, trench diggers and fiber splicers — a class of “unsung heroes” he said the previous FCC ignored in an interview with the Daily Caller News Foundation.

“I don’t envision a world in which the prior administration would have looked out for America’s tower crews and blue-collar workers in this way,” Carr told the DCNF. “It comes down to the priorities of the administration and what types of deals are struck — and we didn’t see any of these types of deals. We saw deals at the FCC, specifically designed to benefit different progressive stakeholder groups, but there was nothing along these lines happening out of the prior administration.”

Carr, who negotiated the agreement alongside the National Association of Tower Erectors (NATE), made labor reforms a non-negotiable prerequisite for regulatory approval. The chairman emphasized his years of experience embedding himself with telecom crews, scaling towers alongside workers to gain firsthand insight into the risks and realities they face.

“I’ve spent a lot of time with them,” Carr said. “I’ve been on top of several 2,000-foot broadcaster towers with them, on top of water towers — basically every type of pole — and it’s real work. It’s hard work. And it’s important that we make sure they’re being treated fairly.”

The agreement — outlined in Verizon’s letter to the FCC — cracks down on persistent industry pain points, limiting Verizon’s reliance on 1099 workers, creating hotlines to report illegal laborers and ending the “turf vendor” model. Under that system, local firms were routinely shut out by middlemen who parceled out contracts to low-cost subcontractors, driving down wages and weakening safety standards on site, according to a NATE press release from January. The trade organization didn’t respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.

Verizon will also scrap its matrix pricing structure, a flat-rate payment scheme NATE criticized for ignoring regional cost variations and the real-world complexities of certain projects.

NATE, which represents over 1,000 businesses in the telecom construction sector, lauded the agreement as a “breakthrough” in a Monday press release — specifically thanking Carr for his role.

“Chairman Carr has invested a lot of time and sweat equity visiting sites and conducting tower climbs with some of America’s best contractor firms and technicians,” CEO Todd Schlekeway said. “These tangible field experiences have provided the Chairman with a deep understanding of the prominent role that NATE members play daily conducting the tough, gritty work on the frontlines to enable connectivity.”

Smaller contractors also scored practical financial wins under the deal. Verizon agreed to accelerate audits — ending long payment reviews by capping them at six months after project completion — and committed to covering third-party compliance software fees, removing a costly headache for firms forced to buy expensive reporting tools just to collect payment. New joint working groups between Verizon and NATE will keep tabs on implementation, ensuring the changes stick.

“Most people, when they turn on their smartphone or turn on their TV — if they think about it at all — maybe they think it’s magic or pixie dust,” Carr said. “But it’s some of the best people you’ll ever meet. Just real, salt-of-the-earth American workers.”

To secure FCC approval, Verizon also agreed to scrap its company-wide diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs “effective immediately,” according to a letter filed with the commission Friday. The telecom giant dropped its workforce diversity targets, ended bonus incentives linked to demographic quotas, and folded multiple employee resource groups into a single compliance-focused office. Verizon didn’t respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.

Carr described this change as a “good step forward for equal opportunity, nondiscrimination and the public interest” in an X post Friday.

Hours later, the FCC announced its approval of the Verizon-Frontier merger, with Carr casting the included protections as part of the broader pro-worker posture of the Trump administration.

“Usually when you see large transactions, they have a way of taking care of Wall Street interests and Main Street can get left to the sidelines,” the chairman explained. “But one of the things President Trump has been very clear about is that his administration is looking out for the blue-collar worker. You can certainly see that in this particular FCC decision.”

AUTHOR

Thomas English

Contributor.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.