Romney, Obama Campaigns Eye Telecom Vacancies for After Election

If Romney wins, former FCC Chairman Richard Wiley will almost certainly be a key voice in helping the Romney transition team set the framework for moving forward, said former commission officials. After leaving the commission in the 1970s, Wiley started his own law firm and now is chairman of Wiley Rein and co-chair of Romney’s Justice Advisory Committee (http://xrl.us/bnv72c). He was a major voice in the George W. Bush transition team. Bryan Tramont could also be a very influential member of Romney’s transition team, former FCC officials said. He was former FCC Chairman Michael Powell’s chief of staff and is now a managing partner at the Wilkinson Barker law firm (http://xrl.us/bnv72i).

The Republican telecom transition team will also likely include Mike Leavitt and John Kneuer, several former Republican government officials told us. Romney picked Leavitt, a former Utah governor and Health and Human Services secretary under George W. Bush, to lead the GOP nominee’s transition team, and is viewed by many as a strong candidate for chief of staff in a Romney administration. Kneuer is a former administrator for the NTIA and led George W. Bush’s spectrum management effort.

Filling administration posts in a second presidential term is different than in the first, so the reelection staffing team will have less work to do, said a former Obama administration official. If President Barack Obama is reelected “you have an infrastructure already in place,” said communications lawyer Andrew Schwartzman, who represents public-interest groups. “The process will be nothing like the start of a new administration particularly because if someone leaves, there is an acting person in place and you've got a chain of command ... so there’s less rush to do it,” he said. “It’s a very inside game,” said MF Global analyst Paul Gallant. “The White House makes the formal appointments but behind the scenes it is a major political scrum. Companies, members of Congress are all jockeying to support their preferred candidates. For FCC appointments, the White House typically works out deals with the opposing party in the Senate so nominees actually get confirmed."

Obama will likely assign the following people to help select candidates to fill any leadership vacancies at the various telecom agencies: Tom Wheeler, Tom Power, Larry Strickling and William Kennard, said former administration officials and Democratic lobbyists. Wheeler is the chairman of the FCC Technology Advisory Council, and a member of Obama’s original transition team for science, technology and space agencies. Ex-FCC Chairman Kennard is the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, and Wheeler is managing director of Core Capital Partners.

The first people to weigh in on Obama’s second-term administration appointments could also include current FCC and NTIA officials, members of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and decision makers at the White House personnel office, Democratic sources said. Current FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski could also have some degree of influence on who will be appointed at the commission, as could Tom Power, OSTP deputy chief technology officer and former NTIA chief of staff, sources said. If Obama wins the election and Democrats maintain the Senate, advisers to Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and Commerce Committee officials in the upper chamber could also weigh in on FCC appointments during the second term.

Picking agency candidates for a new Romney administration will be a much more hurried, politically driven process than if an incumbent president wins, said Schwartzman. With a new administration, “you don’t have an in-place personnel operation, you don’t have acting people on your side, and the agencies are in enemy hands. So it is a much more rushed, more political operation with a lot of control in the hands of the political people and the transition team.”

Traditionally in a new administration, the transition team will hold a series of meetings with likely candidates in November and December to determine who would fill agency posts vacated by the previous administration, said former Republican government officials. Key members of the transition team will be tasked with vetting potential candidates through an extensive interviewing process in Washington. Decisions will not be made right away, the Republicans who used to work for the government said, because it takes time for the transition team to hold interviews and evaluate potential candidates for security clearances.

One of the first things that transition team members will have to decide is who will become the FCC’s interim chairman if Romney wins, which Beltway insiders suggest will be Commissioner Robert McDowell. McDowell has provided communications policy advice to the campaign, but is not involved at other levels, an official said. If Republicans win, sitting commissioners historically provide help with the transition.

Those who could make the biggest impact in filling Romney’s administration posts will likely come from the candidate’s election campaign committee based in Boston, observers said. Though Romney maintains a small group of telecom advisers in Washington, the real “power center” remains in Boston, said a Washington-based communications-industry lawyer who is a Republican. The Washington pre-election transition office is “very bare boned, there is not a lot going on,” he said. “If and when Romney wins the election, a lot of these people are likely to be marginalized, as is typically the case, by the campaign people coming in and filling out the real transition team, the post-election transition. Yes, there are [Romney] people [in Washington] working on this, but most of them will have very, very little if any role post-election.”