FCC Chairman Brendan Carr took to X on Friday to mark a milestone: one full year of his "Delete, Delete, Delete" campaign, an effort that has stripped 338 pages from the federal code of regulations, eliminated approximately 150,000 words of bureaucratic text, and cut 1,274 rule provisions from the agency's books.

In a single year, Carr's FCC has also shuttered roughly 2,000 inactive proceedings that had been left open, creating what Carr described as "regulatory overhang" over industries and innovators.

The numbers alone tell a story. But the details tell a better one.

Telegraph Services and Telephone Booths

During a Breitbart News policy event in mid-March, Carr explained the mechanics of the campaign to Washington Bureau Chief Matthew Boyle. The process was not abstract. It was granular, bureau-by-bureau, page-by-page.

"We've gone through the FCC Code of Federal Regulations, which is our rule book. We took each component of it and went to all the bureaus and offices, and we had everyone go through it page by page: which rule is outdated, which rule can we get rid of, which rule can we cut in half?"

According to Breitbrat, what they found was a regulatory fossil record. Rules governing telegraph services. Rules governing telephone booths. Not relics from some dusty archive, but active entries in the federal code, binding the agency and shaping its posture toward the industries it oversees.

As Carr put it:

"There are things like regulation of telegraph services, which don't exist, and regulation of telephone booths. I mean, it's just stuff that got on the books and stayed on the books for decades."

This is how the regulatory state works. Rules accumulate. Nobody removes them. Every provision, no matter how obsolete, carries the weight of federal authority. And every page of dead regulation signals to the private sector that compliance, not innovation, is the default posture Washington expects.

Ahead of Schedule

Carr noted that the FCC is outpacing the administration's benchmark for deregulation, a 10-to-1 requirement that mandates scrapping ten regulations for every new one enacted.

"It's one of our most productive efforts. We're ahead of schedule on the 10-to-1 regulation requirement from the administration, where you get rid of 10 regulations for every one that you do."

That ratio matters. For decades, the federal government's approach to regulation has been purely additive. Agencies create rules, layer them on top of older rules, and never circle back to ask whether any of it still makes sense. The result is a code that grows like a vine, slowly strangling the industries it wraps around.

A 10-to-1 standard inverts the incentive structure entirely. It forces agencies to justify not just new rules, but the continued existence of old ones. The FCC is proving the model works.

The Dormant Docket Problem

Beyond the rulebook itself, Carr identified another source of regulatory drag: dormant dockets. These are proceedings the FCC opened, sometimes years ago, and simply never closed.

"We've also taken a look at what we call dormant dockets — proceedings the FCC started and left open that create a regulatory overhang."

The agency has now closed approximately 2,000 of these inactive proceedings. Each one, while technically dormant, represented an unresolved question mark hanging over some corner of the telecommunications landscape. Companies operating in those spaces had to plan around the possibility that Washington might, at any moment, revive a years-old proceeding and impose new obligations.

That kind of uncertainty is invisible to voters but corrosive to investment. Closing 2,000 of these dockets doesn't just tidy up paperwork. It tells the market that the FCC has no interest in governing by ambush.

What Deregulation Actually Looks Like

Critics of deregulation love to frame it as recklessness, as though removing a rule governing telephone booths will somehow unleash chaos in the telecommunications sector. The reality is the opposite. A bloated regulatory code doesn't protect consumers. It protects incumbents, empowers bureaucrats, and punishes the small players who can't afford an army of compliance attorneys.

What Carr has executed at the FCC is not a wrecking ball. It's an audit. Page by page, provision by provision, docket by docket. The question at every step was simple: Does this rule still serve a purpose? If the answer was no, it went.

The fact that this had never been done at this scale tells you everything about the culture of federal agencies. Rules are sacred. Process is permanent. And the mere suggestion that Washington might have too many regulations is treated as a radical proposition rather than an obvious observation.

Carr's message on Friday was brief: "One year of Delete, Delete, Delete. More cutting to go."

Good. There are 337 other federal agencies that could use the same treatment.