Any time a major acquisition occurs, it’s standard for regulatory agencies to want to secure some promises before giving it the green light. Verizon’s recently approved purchase of Frontier Communications for $20 billion is no exception, but the concessions that Brendan Carr, Donald Trump’s pick to head the Federal Communications Commission, was able to secure are a little… different. Carr gave the green light to consolidate the industry once Verizon promised it would stop caring about workforce diversity.
In a statement announcing approval of the merger, which will see Verizon take over Frontier’s million broadband subscribers and its sizable fiber optic network, Carr revealed that his support came after Verizon “committed to ending DEI-related practices.”
DEI programs have been something of a bugaboo for Carr ever since he took over the agency, as it has for basically every part of the Trump administration. One of Carr’s early actions as head of the regulatory agency was to launch a probe into Verizon’s diversity, equity, and inclusion polices.
In a letter announcing the investigation, Carr explicitly tied the whole ordeal to Verizon’s then-ongoing attempt to acquire Frontier. “In order to aid the FCC’s resolution of these matters, please reach out to the agency personnel that have been working on Verizon’s pending transactions at the FCC,” he wrote. “They are the FCC personnel most familiar with Verizon’s operations due to their merger review activity.”
While Carr didn’t outright say “promise to kill off your DEI initiatives and we’ll push this thing through,” that does seem to be what happened. He did make it clear in an interview with Bloomberg that this was going to be his M.O. “Any businesses that are looking for FCC approval, I would encourage them to get busy ending any sort of their invidious forms of DEI discrimination,” Carr he told the publication in March.
Verizon isn’t the only company to get what it wants by agreeing to axe DEI programs. T-Mobile was able to get a deal with fiber provider Lumos approved by the FCC after it got rid of a page on its website promoting its DEI efforts. Paramount, which is in the process of trying to complete a merger with Skydance and needs FCC sign-off, told staff it would end its own DEI policies in order to acquiesce to the demands of the Trump administration.
So, if you have any business in front of the Trump administration, don’t worry about whether your deal might result in market consolidation that may ultimately harm consumers. No one is looking into any of that. Just make sure you are willing to hire some white guys so people like Brendan Carr can finally see people who look like him working in these industries.
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