FCC Accused of Hiding Carr Signal Messages With DOGE

This is not the first time a judge has been unimpressed. In August 2025, a federal judge ordered the FCC to produce documents and criticized its response to the lawsuit as vague and uninformative. The latest filing escalates from there, asking the court to deny the FCC motion for summary judgment, order all responsive documents produced within a week, and allow the plaintiffs to open discovery.

How the Signal allegation works mechanically

The most concrete new detail is about a phone number. Carr number was previously disclosed through a separate FOIA request that surfaced a November 2024 email from a Fox News producer confirming an interview.

According to the filing, entering that number into the Signal app shows an active account under the username Brendan Carr. That is the entire mechanism. Signal lets anyone check whether a given phone number is registered to the service, and the plaintiffs say this one is.

Here is why that is awkward for the agency. In a June 3 court filing, the FCC said Carr did not have phone numbers for DOGE personnel and that it is agency policy not to download additional messaging applications such as Signal or WhatsApp on FCC phones. The plaintiffs counter that the policy statement does not settle anything.

What we do know is that a phone is being used for government business and that it has a Signal account in Carr name.

The plaintiffs say they cannot yet tell whether the number belongs to a personal phone or a government issued one. Their theory is that even if Carr never messaged junior DOGE staff, he would have communicated with Musk or other highly placed DOGE officials, and that a prior DOGE case showed personnel routinely conducted business on personal phones using text and Signal.

The records search at the center of the dispute

Beyond Signal, the filing attacks how the FCC defined its search. The plaintiffs say the agency limited its records hunt to emails carrying FCC, DOGE, and GSA domains, despite their objections. If sensitive coordination happened over Signal or personal text instead of those email systems, a domain limited search would never catch it by design.

The filing also flags a gap in what was produced. Travel documents the FCC handed over did not include anything about Carr visits to Starlink facilities, the plaintiffs say, which they treat as another sign the production is incomplete rather than exhaustive.

Why this is a tech transparency story, not just politics

Strip away the names and this is a familiar problem for anyone who manages records. Encrypted, ephemeral messaging apps are excellent for privacy and terrible for accountability when the messages belong to the public. A Signal thread can vanish on a timer, lives outside the email server an agency searches, and leaves no trace in a standard FOIA pull unless someone goes looking for the device itself.

That is the gap the plaintiffs are trying to pry open. They are not claiming to have read Carr messages. They are arguing that the existence of the account, combined with a search deliberately scoped to email domains, means the agency may be technically truthful while still leaving the most relevant communications uncollected.

What happens next over the coming 24 to 72 hours

The immediate action sits with the court. The judge now has competing requests in front of them: the FCC motion for summary judgment, which would effectively end the case in the agency favor, and the plaintiffs push to deny that motion, compel full production within a week, and open discovery.

Expect the near term to play out on paper. The FCC will likely respond to these bad faith accusations in a follow up filing, and given the August 2025 history of judicial criticism, a ruling that orders broader searching or allows discovery would be a meaningful loss for the agency. Ars Technica says it contacted the FCC and will update if the agency comments, so an official statement could land at any point.

The deeper stakes are about precedent. If the court accepts that an active Signal account on a work phone is itself enough to justify discovery, it pressures every agency to treat encrypted messaging as a discoverable record rather than a private side channel. For now, the FCC has not produced the messages, the plaintiffs say it never intended to, and a judge is about to decide who is right.

Source: Ars Technica