Anduril Industries, one of the leading defense companies in Southern California, will expand in Long Beach with a new $1-billion complex near the city’s airport.

Anduril is developing new defense technologies that include drones, missiles, robotic submarines, and autonomous fighter jets. The Long Beach operation will include offices for designer engineers and coders, along with lab space and prototype manufacturing facilities, the company said Thursday.

The new facility will be built at Douglas Park, an industrial park just north of Long Beach Airport with a history of aerospace manufacturing. Anduril has leased more than 1 million square feet of land from real estate developer Sares Regis Group, which will build the new campus.

Construction will begin by the middle of the year, Anduril co-founder Matt Grimm said, and the first building in the complex will open by the end of 2027.

The campus will span approximately 1.18 million square feet across six buildings, combining 750,000 square feet of office space with 435,000 square feet of industrial space dedicated to research and development.

“As we look at the next five to 10 years of growth for the company, we’re going to be embarking on a whole bunch of new programs,” Grimm said. “That means we’re going to need to hire people.”

While many businesses have complained about the high level of taxes and regulations in the state and threatened to move, most find they need to stay because of its hard-to-beat network of companies and deep pool of experienced defense workers.

“The talent exists around Long Beach and the neighboring communities of folks who are just world-class experts in the aerospace sectors is truly, truly remarkable,” Grimm said.

Of course, that doesn’t mean everyone at the company is happy about everything that happens in the state. The company’s outspoken, billionaire co-founder, Luckey Palmer, recently joined the debate about a proposed new tax on billionaires.

The tax proposal, which still needs to gather enough signatures before it can even get on the ballot for a vote in November, is flawed, Palmer said, because it would give company founders huge tax bills they could not afford to pay.

“It makes founder-led companies practically illegal,” he posted on X.

Anduril’s new Long Beach facility will employ about 5,500 workers, with thousands more indirect jobs generated through construction, security, and supporting services, Grimm said.

“We’re going to need to have design labs and machine shops and test labs and test chambers and all the sorts of industrial types of support facilities for these folks,” he said.

The campus is a 30-minute drive from Anduril’s Costa Mesa headquarters and about 90 minutes from the company’s Capistrano test site, the company said, allowing teams to design, test, and iterate quickly across locations.

Anduril has about 7,000 employees in 35 different locations, including international offices, Grimm said. About half of the workers are based in Southern California.

Anduril’s decision to come to Long Beach marks a new chapter in the city’s role as a defense industry bastion that once included a naval base and aerospace manufacturing, including the legendary B-17 bomber of World War II, and more recently the C-17 Globemaster III military transport, still widely in use.

“We have a big history of building complex aircraft here, and we see this as an additional step toward building the next generation of aircraft and technology,” Mayor Rex Richardson said. “Over the last few years, we’ve become one of the fastest-growing aerospace clusters in America.”

Other large new players include spacecraft company Rocket Lab, space-station builder Vast and aviation start-up JetZero, said Richardson, who favors the city’s new nickname “Space Beach.”

“You can liken them to the next generation of the Boeings and the Northrup Grummans,” he said of new aerospace companies in town.

In 2025 Anduril announced it would spend $1 billion to erect its first “Arsenal” manufacturing plant in Columbus, Ohio.

Arsenal-1 will use a common set of commercial manufacturing tooling, machinery, and processes for every type of autonomous vehicle that Anduril produces, the company said. It is set to open this year.

The Federal Communications Commission is taking aim at broadcast networks’ late-night and daytime talk shows, including ABC’s “The View,” which often feature politicians as guests.

On Wednesday, the FCC’s Media Bureau issued a public notice saying broadcast TV stations would be obligated to provide equal time to an opposing political candidate if an appearance by a politician falls short of a “bona fide news” event.

For years, hosts of “The View,” ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” and CBS’ “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” have freely parried with high-profile politicians without worrying about being subjected to the so-called “equal time” rule, which requires broadcasters to bring on a politician’s rival to provide balanced coverage and multiple viewpoints.

With the new guidance, the FCC appears to take a dim view of whether late-night and daytime talk shows deserve an exemption from the “equal time” rules for stations that transmit programming over the public airwaves. The move comes amid FCC Chairman Brendan Carr’s campaign to challenge broadcast networks ABC, CBS and NBC in an effort to shift more power to local broadcasters, including conservative-leaning television station groups such as Nexstar Media Group and Sinclair Broadcast Group.

Since becoming chairman of the FCC a year ago, the President Trump appointee has been critical of CBS, NBCUniversal and Walt Disney Co. He launched investigations into Disney and Comcast’s diversity hiring practices and reopened a “news distortion” probe into CBS’ edits of a 2024 “60 Minutes” interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris after Trump sued the network for more than $10 billion.

Carr withheld approval of CBS parent Paramount’s sale to billionaire scion David Ellison’s Skydance until after Paramount agreed to pay Trump $16 million to settle the suit, which several legal observers had deemed frivolous.

During a social media storm over Kimmel’s comments in the wake of the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk in September, Carr suggested the FCC might use its regulatory hammer over ABC parent Walt Disney Co. if the Burbank giant failed to take action against Kimmel. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr said at the time.

The FCC oversees television station broadcast licenses, and those stations have obligations to serve the public interest.

On Wednesday, the FCC rolled out the new guidance aimed at late-night talk shows and “The View,” saying there’s a difference between a “bona fide news interview” and partisan politics.

“A program that is motivated by partisan purposes, for example, would not be entitled to an exemption under longstanding FCC precedent,” the Media Bureau said in its unsigned four-page document.

The bureau encouraged broadcasters to seek an opinion from the FCC to make sure their shows were in compliance — an advisory that will likely raise anxiety and potentially prompt some TV station groups to scrutinize shows that delve deeply into politics.

ABC, CBS and NBC declined to comment.

Since Trump returned to the White House a year ago, the FCC has stepped up its involvement in overseeing content — a departure from past practice.

Trump has made no secret of his disdain for Kimmel, Colbert, NBC comedian Seth Meyers and various hosts of “The View.”

Recently, “The View” featured former U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, once a Trump acolyte who has become a fierce critic of the president.

Daniel Suhr, president of the conservative Center for American Rights, applauded the FCC move in a statement.

“This important action puts Hollywood hosts and network executives on notice — they can no longer shower Democrats with free airtime while shutting out Republicans,” Suhr said. The organization has lodged several complaints with the FCC about alleged media bias.

Anna M. Gomez, the lone Democrat on the three-person commission, quickly blasted the move.

“For decades, the Commission has recognized that bona fide news interviews, late-night programs, and daytime news shows are entitled to editorial discretion based on newsworthiness, not political favoritism,” Gomez said. “This announcement therefore does not change the law, but it does represent an escalation in this FCC’s ongoing campaign to censor and control speech.”

“The 1st Amendment does not yield to government intimidation,” she said. “Broadcasters should not feel pressured to water down, sanitize or avoid critical coverage out of fear of regulatory retaliation.”

The precedent was established in 2006, when the FCC determined that then-NBC late-night host Jay Leno’s “Tonight Show” interview with actor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who announced his bid for California governor, was a “bona fide” news event, and thus not subject to the FCC rule.

The FCC said that station groups need not rely on that 2006 decision because the agency “has not been presented with any evidence that the interview portion of any late night or daytime television talk show program on air presently would qualify” for such an exemption.

The FCC’s guidance does not apply to cable news programs — only shows that run on broadcast television, which is subject to FCC enforcement actions.