WASHINGTON D.C. — Tickets for the private skybox at the Kennedy Center Honors gala cost $125,000 each according to Kennedy Center guidelines. Federal ethics rules ban employees from taking gifts from entities that do business with, are regulated by, or seek official action from their agency. The FCC currently has three commissioners: Republicans Brendan Carr and Olivia Trusty, and Democrat Anna Gomez.

Trusty voted in favor of the merger before receiving the Kennedy Center Honors tickets from Paramount. Carr and his wife sat in the skybox alongside Paramount's chief executive at the December event. Gomez accepted tickets from Paramount in the past but did not attend the December 2025 gala.

Walter Shaub, the former director of the Office of Government Ethics, rejected the defense that similar gift-taking has occurred under previous administrations. "It’s no excuse to say that you took the gift because everyone else was doing it or that your agency has had a bad habit of indulging in gift taking for a long time," Shaub stated. Shaub added, "That kind of explanation doesn’t work for school children, and it sure as hell doesn’t work for government officials who are supposed to have better judgment than a fifth grader."

"There’s no way that any top federal regulator should ever, ever accept a gift from a regulated company with interests their work will foreseeably affect," Shaub stated. He said, "The appearance of taking gifts like that is terrible. What’s at stake is nothing less than the public’s trust in government."

Virginia Canter, chief counsel for ethics and corruption at Democracy Defenders Fund, said the situation raised serious questions about the commissioners' judgment. She described the situation as deeply troubling, saying, "Pretty disturbing, that’s what I would say. I just don’t understand what they were thinking."

Canter stated that commissioners who accepted tickets cannot participate in the merger matter without damaging the integrity of the government's decision-making process. An FCC spokesperson stated that agency ethics officers have cleared commissioner appearances for years, finding them consistent with ethics law. The FCC stated, "FCC Chairs and officials have attended the same event, in the same ways, consistently from the Trump Administration to the Biden Administration to the Obama Administration." Carr has accepted tickets at least seven times since his 2017 appointment, totaling over $63,000 in gifts according to past financial disclosures.

The FCC has not yet made public Carr's financial disclosure for the previous year. Seven FCC commissioners have accepted Kennedy Center gala tickets from CBS or its parent company over the last decade. An analysis of ethics disclosures shows that seven of the 10 commissioners who served since 2016 accepted tickets worth more than $260,000.

The sequence of events—Trusty's vote on the $8 billion Paramount-Skydance merger followed months later by the acceptance of thousands of dollars in gala tickets from the same company—places the FCC's gift practices under scrutiny from government ethics watchdogs. Shaub and Canter argued that the regulatory relationship between the FCC and Paramount makes the acceptance of such gifts impermissible under federal ethics rules, while the agency maintains that its commissioners' attendance at the Kennedy Center Honors has been consistently cleared by ethics officers across multiple administrations.