FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez doesn’t know why Trump hasn’t fired her yet

Every morning, Federal Communications Commissioner Anna Gomez says she checks her email “to see if I’m going into work.” She’s the last remaining Democrat at the now two-person FCC and has been touring the country to speak out about actions by President Donald Trump and FCC Chair Brendan Carr, who she says seek to censor and control Americans’ speech. Gomez has accused her own agency under Carr’s leadership of “weaponizing” its authority “to silence critics,” and opening “sham investigations” into news outlets like NPR, PBS, ABC, CBS, and NBC. The idea that Gomez could wake up one day to an email dismissing her is not unfounded. That’s essentially how the two Democratic commissioners at the Federal Trade Commission found out that Trump was firing them––even though doing so without cause breached decades-old Supreme Court precedent. Now that it’s only Gomez and Carr left at the commission, since Democrat Geoffrey Starks and Republican Nathan Simington both stepped down last week, the agency no longer has a quorum to vote on significant actions. Only three members of the five-person committee can be from the same party, and while Trump has one Republican nominee awaiting confirmation and a second rumored, Gomez isn’t confident that Trump will eventually move to nominate another Democrat.