Plaintiffs argue the telecom regulator is hiding records that show its chair used a personal Signal account to talk to Elon Musk or his Department of Government Efficiency team, the same unofficial messaging pattern earlier court fights tied to Musk's own aides.
The Federal Communications Commission's search for Chairman Brendan Carr's Signal messages ends at the boundary of the chair's personal account. Plaintiffs in a federal records lawsuit have done what the agency's court filing does not: identified a personal Signal account tied to Carr, and matched it to a phone number the FCC itself turned over in a prior public-records request. They allege that account was the channel Carr used to communicate with Elon Musk or other senior figures inside Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) team. The case has become a structural test of whether a regulator with direct authority over Musk's Starlink and broadband interests can continue to treat the chair's private communications as undiscoverable, and whether the unofficial-messaging pattern earlier court fights tied to Musk's own aides has migrated inside an independent agency.
In filings in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, plaintiffs argue the FCC is stalling document production and running an overly narrow search designed to make responsive records disappear, according to Ars Technica's coverage of the case. The agency told the court on June 3 that Carr "did not have" phone numbers for DOGE personnel and that FCC policy prohibits staff from downloading additional messaging apps such as Signal or WhatsApp on government phones, per the FCC's June 3 court filing. Plaintiffs say that answer is both too narrow and self-contradictory. The same court record shows a November 2024 email from a Fox News producer, surfaced in an earlier FOIA request, that confirmed an interview with Carr and disclosed the phone number now tied to the "Brendan Carr" Signal username, according to the plaintiffs' brief in the docket.
The implication is structural rather than personal. DOGE personnel had already been found in separate litigation to routinely conduct government business on personal phones using Signal, the encrypted messaging app, The Desk reported. Plaintiffs in Carr's case argue that if Musk's aides treated Signal as a working channel, Carr would have communicated with Musk directly through the same channel rather than routing messages through lower-level DOGE staff. That is the conversation the FCC's search, confined to emails with FCC, DOGE, and GSA domains, would never reach.
The scope question is where the conflict-of-interest dimension sharpens. The FCC is the primary federal regulator of the U.S. communications sector, with direct authority over Starlink's spectrum access, its broadband-subsidy eligibility, and any merger or licensing matter that touches Musk's other telecom interests. Carr's travel records produced in the case did not include visits to Starlink facilities that plaintiffs say are documented elsewhere, Ars Technica reported. That omission raises the question of what a chair who has toured the plants of a company his agency regulates might discuss with that company's owner through an app he is not supposed to be using for agency business.
The latest filing sharpens that picture. Frequency Forward, a separate plaintiff in the same docket, filed an opposition brief on June 25 adding a parallel framing to the document-production dispute. That brief argues the FCC's narrow search and belated privilege claims are part of a coordinated effort to keep Carr's Signal records out of any courtroom, per the Frequency Forward opposition brief. Together the briefs argue that in a single court filing the FCC has both confirmed the existence of Carr's Signal username and maintained there is nothing to produce because the chair does not use the app for government work.
The argument also strains against the basic premise of the Federal Records Act, which requires federal officials to preserve agency records, and of the Freedom of Information Act, the U.S. public-records law under which the lawsuit proceeds. If a chair conducts or receives agency business through a personal account, those messages are federal records subject to preservation and production, regardless of whether they sit on a government-issued device. Plaintiffs' position is that discovery is needed precisely to figure out which messages fall into that category, and that the FCC's refusal to search the personal account is what is keeping the answer out of reach, Ars Technica reported.
The case now turns on two narrow technical fights. The first is whether the court will order the FCC to search Carr's personal Signal account and recover whatever message history exists. The second is whether the agency supplements its travel-document production to include the Starlink facility visits plaintiffs say are documented elsewhere. What the public eventually sees of the contemporaneous record of how the chair of the agency that regulates Starlink communicated with Starlink's owner during a period of active FCC decisions affecting Musk's other companies depends on both.