Two Former FCC Chairs Defend Agency’s Fine Powers
The Supreme Court will hear arguments on the issue on April 21.
WASHINGTON, March 30, 2026 – Two former heads of the Federal Communications Commission are asking the Supreme Court to preserve the agency’s ability to levy fines.
The major mobile carriers are arguing the agency’s process ran afoul of the U.S. Constitution by denying them a jury trial after a set of 2024 fines. Federal courts have ruled differently on the issue, and the Supreme Court is considering the case to resolve the split.
Former FCC chairmen Reed Hundt and Tom Wheeler, both Democrats, joined six consumer groups in a Friday filing arguing in favor of preserving the forfeiture scheme.
“The carriers could have contested the underlying facts by insisting that the FCC prove its case to a jury,” they wrote. “The carriers chose instead to pay the penalties and seek review in the court of appeals.”
The FCC and Department of Justice have also defended the agency’s ability to issue fines. They told the high court last week that without fines many of the FCC’s rules would “go effectively unenforced.”
The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in the case on April 21. The carriers’ claims stem from the 2024 Supreme Court decision in SEC v. Jarkesy, in which justices ruled the Securities and Exchange Commission violated the Seventh Amendment by not providing a jury trial before issuing fines.
The Communications Act’s process does allow entities fined by the FCC to get a jury trial before they’re forced to pay, provided companies would refuse to pay and wait for the DOJ to bring a collection action. In practice, large companies typically pay their fines, which grants them the ability to challenge the agency’s decision in an appellate court.
Hundt, Wheeler, and the consumer advocates argued that’s enough to satisfy the Seventh Amendment right to a jury trial.
“The Seventh Amendment right to a jury trial may be – and routinely is – waived,” they wrote. “All that is required is the opportunity to seek a jury’s adjudication of facts; that opportunity was available here.”
The brief was also signed by the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society, Consumer Reports, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the National Consumer Law Center, the National Consumers League, and Public Knowledge.
The carriers, plus industry groups, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and multiple think tanks, have argued that the consequences of nonpayment were too great to make it practical.
Nonpayment “triggers an avalanche of consequences, the whole point of which is to render nonpayment functionally impossible. But under the statute, nonpayment is the only path to a jury,” industry groups CTIA, NCTA, and USTelecom wrote last month. “The result is that there is no such path at all. This Court should not condone a jury right that exists only on paper.”
They argued companies could suffer reputational harm, both with the public and before an agency that they depend on to operate their businesses.
The former chairs and consumer groups countered that FCC-regulated companies, including the carriers, regularly sue the agency over its decisions.
“That the carriers frequently spar with the FCC belies the notion of specific ill-will incurred from their waiting for the FCC to enforce forfeiture penalties,” they wrote.
FCC Chairman Brendan Carr dissented from the fines when they came down but the agency has been defending the penalties, and its ability to issue them, under his leadership. The agency told justices last week that without authority to issue fines it would be forced to rely on “all-or-nothing remedies" like license suspensions or revocations.
Also on Friday, Illinois’s utility regulator and the Constitutional Accountability Center, a progressive think tank, submitted filings in support of the FCC. The Illinois Citizens Utility Board said it was involved in a separate case where a company was challenging the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s ability to issue fines, and that a decision in the carriers’ favor could call other agency’s enforcement schemes into question.
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