Trump’s Former FCC Head Ajit Pai Asks Supreme Court to Uphold TikTok Ban

Ajit Pai, the former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission during Donald Trump’s first term, is splitting from his old boss and encouraging the Supreme Court to allow a ban on TikTok to move forward. According to Business Insider, Pai and former Department of Treasury official Thomas Feddo filed a brief last week encouraging the justices to uphold the law that would banish TikTok’s operation within US borders despite Trump’s push to stop the ban.

Pai’s primary argument is that there is existing legal precedent to support the legality of the law, passed by Congress last year that would require TikTok’s parent company ByteDance to sell the platform or cease operations in the US. That precedent: Pai’s own crackdown on Chinese companies.

Back when Pai was head of the FCC, he designated two companies headquartered in China as national security threats. The agency banned cellular providers from using government subsidies to purchase telecom equipment from manufacturers Huawei and ZTE, on the grounds that those companies could be collaborating with the Chinese government to spy on Americans—a concern that was at least in part backed up by findings from journalists and the intelligence community.

Pai called the approach taken to restrict apps like TikTok in the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act “extremely similar” to his own efforts to tackle Chinese telecom equipment providers, noting “Congress and the Executive Branch have routinely identified in legislation or regulation specific companies under China’s control that pose particular national security risk.”

While Pai finds himself in conflict with 2024 Donald Trump, who has filed his own brief asking the court to delay the January 19 deadline for ByteDance to sell TikTok, he’s still very much in alignment with 2017-2021 Trump. It was Trump who first floated the ban and tried to carry it out all on his own via executive order in 2020, which was eventually blocked by a federal judge. Trump also backed rules that restricted the sale of equipment to companies like Huawei and ZTE in an attempt to cut off the Chinese firms’ access to American technology.

But Trump had a change of heart on his TikTok attack earlier this year after meeting with Jeff Yass, a major investor in TikTok and—you won’t believe this!—a big-time Trump backer who poured in nearly $100 million to conservative causes this past election cycle. His support for the app was further cemented following his victory in the 2024 presidential election, which he attributed at least in part to his popularity on TikTok. This is also going to come as a big surprise but, TikTok started courting Trump’s support and suddenly, in what is surely an unrelated coincidence, the app became way more friendly to Trump-related content. Wild how that kinda thing just happens.

Anyway, there has been no indication that Pai will be returning to the Trump administration (he seems perfectly happy playing a role in a private equity firm that is busy buying out telecom companies), so it’s probably safe for him to take a stance against his former boss. If anything, Pai’s position is more principled than Trump’s, so credit where it’s due.