Trump's Distancing from Project 2025 Not Seen Affecting Carr's Prospects

FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr’s Project 2025 ties likely won’t damage his chances of becoming the agency's chair if Donald Trump is elected president in November, even though the Trump campaign has distanced itself from the project (see 2407110054). Commissioner Nathan Simington is listed as a project adviser but didn’t write a chapter, as Carr did, or play a more public role.

"President Trump’s campaign has been very clear for over a year that Project 2025 had nothing to do with the campaign, did not speak for the campaign, and should not be associated with the campaign or the President in any way,” a statement from senior campaign advisers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita said. The message to “anyone or any group trying to misrepresent their influence with President Trump and his campaign -- [is] it will not end well for you." Former Trump Office of Personnel Management official Paul Dans stepped down last week from his role as the project leader. In addition, Dans said he plans this month to leave the Heritage Foundation, which organized the project.

Carr played a prominent role in Project 2025, laying out plans for rolling back Section 230 protections for tech companies, increasing emphasis on spectrum, cutting red tape for infrastructure rollouts and further restricting Chinese companies through an expansion of the agency’s “Covered List.” The Project 2025 report repeatedly mentions dangers that Chinese company TikTok poses. Trump recently reversed course on blocking TikTok, saying doing so would only benefit Facebook (see 2403120062). Carr didn’t comment for this story.

Project 2025 isn’t an issue for Carr, said Nathan Leamer, a former aide to Trump's FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, who was also involved with the project. “Concerns are with Heritage for fundraising of the project, not the contributors.”

“Hundreds of the most renowned and respected members of the conservative policy space” were contributors and would be “the top picks” in a second Trump administration, Leamer said: “They are still in the fold.”

"Carr's communications chops are strong enough to withstand this," former FCC aide Adonis Hoffman predicted. Carr “has been on the cutting edge of just about every major GOP telecom and tech policy position, so I would not bet against him.” Carr "has been especially strong on security and foreign policy issues, which go a long way with Trump."

“Lots of Republicans and aspiring appointees wanted to be affiliated” with Project 2025 and “I don't think it leaves a stain on anyone,” a former senior FCC official said. “Do any stains matter anymore in the current political environment?"

“The issue is Heritage, not the individual contributors (almost 100, many from different organizations),” Strand Consult Executive Vice President Roslyn Layton, who was part of Trump’s transition team in 2016, wrote in an email. “Heritage issues that Mandate for Leadership report with every presidential election; it may appeal to Heritage’s audience, but it’s not a playbook for Big Tent Republicanism.”

Layton doesn’t believe Carr’s involvement in Project 2025 would prevent him from becoming FCC chair. “Carr has distinguished himself by his actions well beyond any chapter in a book. President Joe Biden renominated him ... through June 2028. I can see Trump elevating him as chair.” Project 2025’s messaging “was arrogant in presuming to speak for the Trump campaign,” Layton said. “I never believed that 2025 Project was blessed by Trump.”

The biggest potential impediment “is where is Trump on TikTok?” which has been a signature issue for Carr, a lawyer who represents telecom clients said. Like others, the lawyer said Carr's association with Project 2025 likely won’t hurt him: “That was a trial balloon. It got shot down. Trump decided it was a political liability so he abandoned it.” Aside from Carr and Simington, there aren't a lot of obvious candidates for communications jobs in a second Trump administration, the lawyer added.

The communications policy section of Project 2025 "hasn’t garnered much criticism and, in fact, there’s a pretty broad consensus as to key parts of it,” Free State Foundation President Randy May said in an email. "I don’t see any way [that] Carr's or Simington's participation should affect their chances of being named chair, or of being renominated as commissioner, by Trump.”

May said he wasn’t involved in Project 2025, "but from what I’ve read, it’s the type of change-in-administration project that Heritage has been engaged in since 1980. There are obviously parts of it that some people like and others that they dislike, but that’s in the nature of a project like that."