Hill was policy director for the Center for Humane Technology, co-founder of FairVote and political reform director at New America. You can reach him on X @StevenHill1776.
This is part of a series offering a nonpartisan counter to Project 2025, a conservative guideline to reforming government and policymaking during the first 180 days of a second Trump administration. The Fulcrum's cross partisan analysis of Project 2025 relies on unbiased critical thinking, reexamines outdated assumptions, and uses reason, scientific evidence, and data in analyzing and critiquing Project 2025.
The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 proposes to enlist the Federal Communications Communication into a second Trump administration’s agenda for regulating radio, television, cellular, broadband wireless, cable and satellite in a more right-wing direction. However, reflecting a philosophical split within the conservative movement, this chapter also shares some ground with progressive thinkers on these matters.
The FCC is barely known to everyday Americans, but it is an extremely influential regulatory agency that employs about 1,500 people with an annual budget of $390 million. Along with the Federal Trade Commission, it oversees much of the regulatory regime regarding big technology companies such as Facebook, Google, Apple, TikTok, Twitter/X and more. It has five commissioners appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate; they are divided politically between the two major parties with a majority of commissioners appointed always from the president’s party, with the FCC’s chairperson bestowed with significant executive authority.
Project 2025’s section on the FCC covers several broad thematic areas, with most emphasis placed on reining in Big Tech and promoting national security. On the first, Project 2025 initially almost sounds like President Joe Biden and other anti-monopolists, inveighing against “the threats … posed by … corporate behemoths” that are not “merely exercising market power; they are abusing dominant positions.”
But then Project 2025 takes an odd pivot, directing its anti-monopoly sentiment at a misplaced target: alleged silencing and censoring of conservative voices. This theme harkens back to 2020 when Donald Trump and other Republicans raged against Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, alleging anti-conservative bias. Indeed, following the Trump-incited Jan. 6, 2021, riot to stop certification of a presidential election, Trump was banned from many of these outlets. Rep. Jim Jordan (Ill.), GOP chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, bluntly accused these outlets, saying, “Big Tech is out to get conservatives."
So now conservatives are out to get Big Tech. However, their claim of victimization is hard to justify, considering that digital media practically made Trump into a leading national figure. His and other right-wingers' brand of outrage, extremism and QAnon-laced conspiracy-mongering has been a perfect fit for the sensation-driven advertising machines of digital media. In fact several studies have found just the opposite of the accusation: These digital media platforms have greatly amplified right-wing voices, “often affording conservatives greater reach than liberal or nonpartisan content creators” through the platforms’ algorithmic promotion of extreme content.
The conservative bellyaching is not only unsubstantiated by any facts, but this reaction reflects a deep confusion, and not just by conservatives but by liberals too, over the nature of digital media communications. Are Facebook, Twitter/X, TikTok and YouTube the same as The New York Times and Fox News, or AT&T and Comcast? No one would expect the liberal-leaning New York Times to publish whatever Trump espouses, just as no one would expect conservative firebrand Fox News to broadcast Vice President Kamala Harris unedited. So are these digital media platforms the same as news outlets that are free to publish — or not publish — whoever or whatever they want? Or are they a “common carrier” pipeline that must carry everyone and everything, regardless of content, much like a phone company or cable company takes all customers, no matter what you gossip about on the phone?
The answer is: They are both. Indeed, digital media platforms are an entirely new species of communication that requires a new regulatory approach, which the United States has so far still failed to establish on a solid, values-based foundation. Given the firehose of misinformation coming from right-wing sources, whether during the Covid-19 pandemic or fabrications over a stolen election, by any objective journalistic standards this has not been a case of censorship as much as responsible editing and publishing. Yet Project 2025, in its wounded, self-victimized posturing, shows little signs of this awareness.
Instead, it relies on a vague call for reining in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which immunizes digital media platforms from legal liability for controversial user-generated content. Curtailment of Section 230 and making the platforms more legally liable, like a publisher or broadcaster is, previously has been a demand from some on the liberal left. So it’s noteworthy that the populist GOP of Donald Trump and vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance has, to some extent, jumped on this progressive idea. But Project 2025’s proposal is so vague that it would be ineffective, and mostly just reflects more misguided thinking about the alleged censorship of conservative views.
It is also notable that there is no mention in the FCC chapter about possible reforms for the governance of TV broadcasters or cable TV. The fact that Fox had to fork out nearly $1 billion to Dominion Voting Systems in a defamation lawsuit because it was caught red-handed, through many depositions, lying and fabricating disinformation about Dominion’s role in an allegedly stolen election, did not merit a mention here. Given Fox’s primacy in the constellation of conservative media outlets, this was ample proof of a conservative disinformation war, and any honest document would have contained some kind of reckoning.
This misdirection over the media landscape reality initially dominates the FCC chapter, but then it moves into more interesting territory. It calls for a number of policy goals worth considering, including:
- Better transparency rules applied to Big Tech around things like manipulation of search results, demonetization of business accounts and a transparent appeals process.
- Empowering consumers to choose their own content filters, instead of Facebook doing it for you.
- Ensure stronger protections to prevent young children from accessing social media sites.
- Requiring digital media platforms to contribute, as phone and cable companies do, to the Universal Service Fund, which subsidizes affordable internet and rural connectivity programs.
On national security, the FCC chapter vacillates between the usual right-wing, anti-China rhetoric and some useful proposals reflecting a more realistic assessment of China. Proposals worth considering include addressing potential national security threats from Chinese technology companies like Huawei and TikTok. More broadly, Project 2025 points the spotlight on how greedy U.S. technology companies have been aiding the development of Chinese technology as the price for gaining access to Chinese markets.
When China had a less authoritarian government under President Hu Jintao, this might have made some geopolitical as well as economic sense. But since President Xi Jingping’s accession in 2013, China has started using technology, especially artificial intelligence, to exert authoritarian domestic control. Yet U.S. companies are still helping China to train and improve its artificial intelligence technology.
Project 2025 includes several other sensible proposals, such as supporting a new generation of low-Earth orbit satellites like StarLink and Kuiper, which can beam a reliable, high-speed Internet signal to nearly any part of the globe at a fraction of the cost of other technologies, as a way to significantly accelerate efforts to end the digital divide.
But on the whole, Project 2025’s understanding of the FCC and its mission is so tainted by its misguided perceptions of conservative persecution that it renders much of this chapter less useful.
More articles about Project 2025
- A cross-partisan approach
- An Introduction
- Rumors of Project 2025’s Demise are Greatly Exaggerated
- Department of Education
- Managing the bureaucracy
- Department of Defense
- Department of Energy
- The Environmental Protection Agency
- Education Savings Accounts
- Department of Veterans Affairs
- The Department of Homeland Security
- U.S. Agency for International Development
- Affirmative action
- A federal Parents' Bill of Rights
- Department of Labor
- Intelligence community
- Department of State
- Department of the Interior
- Federal Communications Commission
- A perspective from Europe
- Department of Health and Human Services
- Voting Rights Act
- Another look at the Federal Communications Commission
Children watch a July Fourth Parade along the Walkway of Heroes and Independence Avenue on July 04, 2026 in Tappan, New York.
The Great American Grumpfest
Our nation’s 250th birthday party didn’t feel especially patriotic and wasn’t as much fun as the 200th anniversary was.
President Trump, who did his best to co-opt our holiday for his personal aggrandizement, was a major reason. The party he threw in Washington, D.C., was crankier than uplifting, and less about celebrating our shared past and a promising future than about reminding us how far we have strayed from our founders’ plan to create a republic that future Americans would keep in good working order.
Credit Trump this much. He has a singular gift for picking at scabs that other politicians would rather ignore and pushing us into reckonings we don’t need.
The thing is, Americans have seen all this before. Sometimes the makeover we were encouraged to undertake was more conservative, sometimes more liberal. Whatever direction we were pushing, however, the reckoning we had in mind this time had to be more forthright and the conclusion more definitive than it was the last time.
Our current discontents, the ones behind the reckoning President Trump has been trying to inspire, are not trivial. Included among them are immigration, birthright citizenship, exploding healthcare costs, election rigging, a gag-inducing national debt, how we educate our children, too many genders, racial differences we can’t move past, a lopsided economy that favors more well-off Americans, and historic levels of political corruption and graft. Add to these the several foreign adventures he has pushed us into or is anxious to undertake, and you have the makings of a national headache the likes of which we haven’t had in half a century.
All the elbow-throwing and overheated rhetoric we’re using today have begun to look almost normal in all the ways that bickering neighbors and feuding family members appear normal. But they have also made us look mean-spirited and have portrayed our differences as irreconcilable. To ourselves, of course, but also to many people outside the United States who might be forgiven for turning their heads and not looking at the national car wreck we Americans show no interest in avoiding.
The good news, as I suggested above, is that Americans have had a great deal of practice dealing with challenges and national car wrecks like these.
This essay begins to lay out the reasons why.
By way of illustration, we have our seemingly insatiable demand for more bad news about race in America.
Sixty years after being released from the legal constrictions that bedeviled both white and black Americans, many white people have come to believe the color that used to make them unassailable is now a sign of a moral inferiority born of a racial animus they can never wash off. Many black people, on the other hand, are insisting that America is as hopelessly stacked against them as the formerly unassailable white people’s ancestors used to tell their black ones.
The result is that many people today are buying into racist nightmares and mumbo jumbo that their black and white ancestors worked hard and effectively to put in each other’s heads.
This might be dismissed as crazy behavior if it weren’t so important to rituals Americans have long used to express their deepest fears about each other while figuring out what move they can make that won’t end with their world crashing down on everybody’s head.
Unfortunately, the kind of cultural sleight of hand we have used to ramp up our racial differences has been appropriated by people who have many other cultural fears and unresolved differences with each other. Their clumsy but culturally prescribed missteps are making all these other issues look as irremediable as our racial problems.
A good place to start an answer to how we back away from ledges is Alexis de Tocqueville’s writing on early-19th-century American democracy. He had an optimistic take on Americans’ unscripted displays of public bravado, recrimination, and payback.
For him, these were occasions when people tried to mitigate the effects of the unfair hand they were dealing someone else or had themselves been dealt by behaving in ways quite at odds with how they would otherwise be expected to act. These inversions of what Tocqueville called “the natural order of conscience” presented themselves as a loud but culturally muted challenge to the hypocrisies that people had built into the world they’d made together.
One of his favorite illustrations of early-American hypocrisy involved slave masters sleeping with their less-than-worthy slaves. To the best of my knowledge, he didn’t pick up on all the ways that slaves messed with their owners. Their well-chronicled and quiet resistance showed that even severely ill-treated people can exercise more control over their lives than outsiders appreciate.
Be that as it may, such inversions of a people’s “natural order of conscience” make a good public show of them wrestling with demons they can’t or may not want to shake off, but in any case, are nowhere close to figuring out how to cast out.
Implicit in these disruptions was the discomforting idea that people might flip the entire script and turn the world on its head in more permanent ways. That kind of flipping worked out better for us in our revolution against England than in our Civil War. These events taught us the value of stepping back from historically unprecedented ledges.
Americans of late have been giving loud expression to a long list of things they don’t like about each other and the last makeover they started but didn’t finish a half-century ago. The outcome of our fights today will be as revealing as they are embarrassing to everyone who imagined they could recast our country in a way that privileged their favorite kind of Americans.
Their disappointment with the accommodations they strike will be palpable, but the middling results they achieve with all their pushing and shoving won’t be anything they can’t live with.
Anthropologists who have written about such moments in other cultures less “advanced” than our own show that people find ways to work around their seemingly irreconcilable differences without ever fully resolving them. Indeed, the patches and repairs people make have the unheralded effect of reinforcing rather than undermining the legitimacy of the practices and values they thought were fundamentally flawed.
For example…
White guilt and black pessimism do more good than putting cash into the pockets of professional shamers and handwringers. They give the rest of us who don’t feel guilty or powerless more time to make the world less racially unequal. Good news.
Regarding illegal immigration, the entrance requirements for future immigrants will remain stringent. Americans will applaud the continued detention and deportation of the few illegal immigrants who commit serious crimes. Good news.
All the people who came to the United States without being legally vetted and were locked up for a time will be released in numbers small enough to avoid serious media attention. Along with the several million other good people who snuck in but avoided capture, the former detainees will go to school, find gainful employment, pay their taxes, and stay out of trouble. Many will eventually become citizens. Good news.
Investigations into election tampering and Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential loss will come to an unceremonious conclusion the day after his second term ends. Many Americans will grumble about this, but there will also be some quiet partying, too. Good and bad news.
Congressional hearings into all the grifting accomplished by people tied to the Trump administration will end without anyone having to pay a dime back to the American taxpayers. Bad news, we’ll learn to live with.
New laws and regulations will be created in the hope that the kind of corruption practiced by President Trump will not be repeated for another 250 years. Good news, I hope we’ll live long enough to enjoy.
Show trials for people who allegedly vandalized the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, if they happen, will get big television viewer ratings. Good news.
Trials for pardoned Capitol insurrectionists who committed serious crimes after their release should get more attention, but won’t. Bad news.
We will continue to hear nothing from most of the people who were pardoned for crimes they committed in the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. They will keep their mouths shut and their heads down for the rest of their life. Good news.
The gold-gilded ornaments that Donald Trump had plastered all over the White House will be shipped to Mar-a-Lago, where the former president will sell them on eBay. Fun news.
American taxpayers end up paying for most of the new East Wing, the removal of the miniature gladiatorial arena that was built behind the White House, and the restoration of the White House rose garden. Bad news.
The Triumphal Arch was never built. Good news.
Trad wives and gay couples raise perfectly lovely children. Good but unsurprising news.
Trans men and women learn that most Americans can’t figure out who they used to be. No one gives a second thought to their use of “family bathrooms” or “unisex bathrooms” in public settings, businesses, and schools. Communities will sponsor athletic teams that have trans boys and girls just to show they can. Good news.
Budget deficits will be kicked down the road for someone else’s children to pay down. Bad news.
Federal agencies that had their budgets and employee ranks slashed during President Trump’s second term are getting some of the money and lost positions back. Good news.
Elite universities will buy their way out of DEI purgatory by competing for conservative scholars whose inflated salaries dwarf those of their liberal colleagues, who will think about suing their institutions for reverse discrimination but won’t be able to figure out who would pay for it or care. More fun news.
Okay. I’ve probably missed some ways that Americans will step back from the ledges they have been making noises about leaping off. But to the extent that my predictions pan out, the best and most important moral of the stories about us stepping away is this: everything we lost and took back, or had returned to us, will have happened without our government collapsing, civic traditions crumbling, or our people beating each other up.
The reason why is that the differences Americans have with each other really weren’t as irreconcilable as we made them out to be. The empty-sounding bromide that Americans have more that unites us than divides us turns out to be true, not just metaphorically but in fact.
Now that is really something to celebrate.
Daniel J. Monti (danieljmonti.com) is Professor of Sociology at Saint Louis University and the author of American Democracy and Disconsent: Liberalism and Illiberalism in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, and the Capitol Insurrection.