Ajit Pai
American attorney and former FCC chairman in the United States
Ajit Varadaraj Pai (; born January 10, 1973) is an American lawyer who served as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) from 2017 to 2021. He became a partner at the private-equity firm Searchlight Capital in April 2021. He became the president and chief executive officer (CEO) of CTIA on April 1, 2025.
The son of Konkani Indian immigrants to the United States, Pai grew up in Parsons, Kansas. He is a graduate of both Harvard University and the University of Chicago Law School. He worked as a lawyer in various offices of the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, with a two-year stint as an in-house lawyer for Verizon Communications. He joined the FCC as a lawyer in its Office of General Counsel in 2007. He was nominated to be a commissioner in 2011 by President Barack Obama, who followed tradition in preserving balance on the commission by accepting the recommendation of Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell. He was confirmed unanimously by the U.S. Senate on May 7, 2012, and was sworn in on May 14, 2012, for a five-year term.
In January 2017, newly inaugurated president Donald Trump designated Pai as FCC chairman.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ajit Pai” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.