Republican FCC commissioner says Biden admin is targeting Elon Musk with 'regulatory harassment'

Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Commissioner Carr said Tuesday that the agency's decision to rescind a nearly $900 million award to Elon Musk's SpaceX was politically motivated.

Musk and his companies are fighting numerous investigations launched by President Joe Biden's administration, many of which have occurred since it acquired the social media platform Twitter, now X, in October 2022. The FCC's rejection of an award of $885 million to SpaceX's Starlink to provide high-speed broadband Internet service to more than 640,000 homes. and rural businesses are aligned with other examples of the Biden administration's “harassment” of Musk, Carr supposed in a dissenting statement of the decision.

“Today's decision certainly fits the Biden administration's pattern of regulatory harassment,” Carr wrote. “Indeed, the Commission's decision today to revoke an $885 million award in 2020 to Elon Musk's Starlink, an award Starlink won after agreeing to provide high-speed Internet service speed to more than 640,000 rural households and businesses in 35 states, is a decision that cannot be explained by any objective application of law, fact or policy.”

Last year, after Elon Musk bought Twitter, President Biden gave federal agencies the green light to go after him.

And they have done it.

Today, the FCC joins the growing list of federal agencies participating in the regulatory harassment of Elon Musk.

dissident pic.twitter.com/1zEoGCwiNk

— Brendan Carr (@BrendanCarrFCC) December 12, 2023

Shortly after Musk's acquisition of X, Biden declared that Musk's dealings with foreign governments warranted an investigation.

“I think Elon Musk's cooperation and/or technical relationships with other countries … is worthy of scrutiny, whether he's doing anything inappropriate or not, I'm not suggesting that.” Biden he said in November 2022. “I suggest [it’s] … worth watching … that's all I'll say.”

That statement by Biden provided government agencies with the “green light” to go after him, Carr said.

“It doesn't make sense,” Musk published in response to Tuesday's rejection. “Starlink is the only company that really solves rural broadband at scale!”

The FCC said its denial was because Starlink failed to demonstrate its ability to meet requirements to provide service to hundreds of thousands of homes in 35 states with money from the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund initiative ( RDOF). The commission has not replaced Starlink's bid with any other company to meet the requirements, Carr alleged.

The FCC before denied Starlink's award in August 2022 because the company failed to adequately demonstrate that it could meet the program's requirements. Starlink argued for the commission to review the decision, but the FCC reaffirmed it based on a standard that had never been used before, Carr alleged.

“The FCC followed a careful legal, technical and policy review to determine that this applicant had failed to meet its burden,” said FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel. he said Reuters.

Carr and fellow Republican Commissioner Nathan Simington dissented while all three Democratic commissioners voted to rescind the grant.

“Starlink is arguably the only viable option to immediately connect many of the Americans who live and work in rural and remote areas of the country where high-speed, low-latency Internet has been unreliable, unaffordable, or completely unavailable, same people. RDOF was supposed to connect,” Christopher Cardaci, SpaceX VP of Legal he wrote in a letter to the FCC.

The FCC and the White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.

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