The FCC’s broad power to require broadcast media to operate in “the public interest, convenience, and necessity” has long been a loaded gun available for abuse, and it has lately been used to justify a shocking rise in government speech suppression. The next Congress must pass legislation to narrow and define it.

Trump FCC Chair Brendan Carr has wielded “public interest” to threaten and investigate broadcasters for speech as core to the First Amendment as editing an interview with then-presidential candidate Kamala Harris; reporting on local ICE operations; covering the Iran war in ways that the President dislikes; and continuing to air Jimmy Kimmel’s comedy in the face of White House opposition. Carr recently “reminded” broadcasters of their public interest obligations, in a document that consigns the statutory prohibition on FCC censorship to a footnote and mentions the First Amendment only to discuss the ways in which it arguably does not apply to broadcasters. And Carr’s threats run not only to broadcast licensees, but to the media companies that own and operate them; thus, he has weaponized the public interest authority to leverage licenses of ABC’s owned and operated stations to attack the speech of Jimmy Kimmel and the corporate practices of the Disney corporation.

It comes as no surprise that the second Trump administration has transformed the FCC into a regulatory cudgel aimed at both suppressing opposition speech and rewarding administration-friendly speech; this weaponization of regulatory authority is how modern authoritarians capture journalism. In Hungary, Victor Orbán ran this playbook perhaps most effectively, establishing a Media Council that wielded its licensing and merger review authority to successfully undermine independent media and ensure that his allies controlled all major media outlets.

The public interest standard governs the awarding, renewal, and transfer of licenses (that is, merger approval). The broad authority that it provides the agency over licensees leaves both broadcasters and their corporate parents exposed to government jawboning. The language dates to 1927, when scarcity of radio frequency was a major problem and the modern conception of free speech had not yet coalesced in the Supreme Court or the public imagination. Today, multivocality exists far beyond the airwaves, and the vestigial public interest standard has been transmuted into a tool of abuse. And, while the recent volume and frequency of abuse is unprecedented, Democrats have not been immune from the temptation to use the authority to suppress speech.

Meanwhile, there’s a growing consensus on the libertarian right that the FCC should be eliminated entirely, in part based on these abuses. But the specific problem that Carr’s term has highlighted is the breadth of the FCC’s content regulation authorities. The Supreme Court could take a major step toward solving this problem by updating its jurisprudence on First Amendment rights in the broadcast context to account for these developments—its 1969 decision in Red Lion is its most recent decision directly on point—but it is Congress that is best situated to solve the problem by trimming the relevant statutory authority.

Congress must replace the FCC’s current broad and vague public interest authority with a definition explicitly enumerating permitted areas of regulation—and with respect to content regulation authorities those should be exceedingly narrow. Reform legislation must make clear that there is no residual, unenumerated FCC power to regulate speech. This specific definition should foreclose the FCC from, for example, sua sponte determining that “partisanship” violates the public interest standard and imposing license consequences based on its assessment of a station’s partisan content.

It is most imperative that legislation explicitly repeal the “news distortion” policy, an uncodified authority to which the FCC has laid claim for decades and which has been a key vector of recent abuse. A bipartisan coalition of former FCC commissioners and chairs (which my organization represents) have united behind the need to repeal the policy in order to protect speech. As the Supreme Court recently put it in Moody v. Netchoice, “it is no job for government to decide what counts as the right balance of private expression—to ‘un-bias’ what it thinks biased, rather than to leave such judgments to speakers and their audiences.”

Congress should also consider whether other content regulations, such as children’s television requirements and indecency and obscenity rules, still make sense in today’s media environment—with an eye to the fact that in the context of broadcast licensing, all regulatory requirements risk becoming vectors for government suppression of speech. Current statutes also give the FCC election-related content regulation authorities—the separately codified equal opportunities and lowest unit charge requirements. These each have played crucial roles in the election information ecosystem, and have shaped Americans’ expectations about it, such that removing them abruptly would create real confusion. But they also create opportunities for abuse, and more thinking about long-term reforms is needed.

Simultaneously, Congress should strengthen section 326 of the Communications Act, the anti-censorship provision. That language makes clear that the FCC lacks any “power of censorship… and no regulation or condition shall be promulgated or fixed by the Commission which shall interfere with the right of free speech…” But the FCC and the Supreme Court have suggested the provision mostly concerns prior restraints, and it has not prevented the FCC from imposing license consequences for content after the fact. Reform legislation should clarify that the FCC may never impose a regulation or condition, including any license consequences, for licensee speech beyond the enumerated speech authorities—and any action at all that constitutes viewpoint discrimination or retaliation.

Congress should further strengthen the ban on censorship by including a private right of action along the lines of the one described in the recently-introduced JAWBONE Act—so that the burden is on the agency to demonstrate that its action does not violate the statute or the First Amendment.

Finding solutions to protect speech has never been more urgent; the Supreme Court’s decision in Slaughter has called into question the status of the FCC as an independent agency—and Chair Carr has disclaimed any independence. While this shift may necessitate deeper structural changes to the agency going forward, legislative amendments to curtail the public interest authority are the most narrowly-tailored solution to the speech suppression problem lately posed by the FCC.