Donald Trump recently has distanced himself from the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 manifesto (see 2407050015), but its authors are his close policy advisors. Accordingly, his election would likely mean chaos for the federal bureaucracy, including agencies like the FCC, FTC and the NTIA, experts said. As many as 50,000 federal employees could lose their jobs if a Trump administration cleans house, experts told us. Project 2025 includes a chapter on the FCC that Commissioner Brendan Carr wrote. Carr is considered the favorite to become FCC chair if Trump wins (see 2407120002).
Expect a Donald Trump White House and FCC to focus on deregulation and undoing the agency's net neutrality and digital discrimination rules, telecom policy experts and FCC watchers tell us. Brendan Carr, one of the two GOP minority commissioners, remains the seeming front-runner to head the agency if Trump wins the White House in November (see 2407120002). Despite repeated comments from Trump as a candidate and president calling for FCC action against companies such as CNN and MSNBC over their news content, many FCC watchers on both sides of the aisle told us they don’t expect the agency to actually act against cable networks or broadcast licenses under a second Trump administration.
Senate Commerce Committee Chair Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., told us Thursday she plans to hold a follow-up meeting with members of that panel and the Armed Services Committee later this month on her Spectrum and National Security Act (S-4207). She’s hoping to jump-start stalled spectrum legislative talks after S-4207’s momentum appeared to stall amid a series of scuttled May and June Senate Commerce markups (see 2406180067). The Senate Armed Services-Commerce meeting will happen “when we get back” the week of July 22, after a week-long congressional recess to accommodate the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. “We had a call with some” Senate Armed Services and Commerce members before scheduling the canceled June 18 markup session, “but we didn’t get to communicate with everybody” before pulling the vote. She hoped to hold the follow-up meeting this week, "but everything that’s been transpiring” meant it’s been “pretty busy around here.” Senate Armed Services Committee ranking member Roger Wicker of Mississippi and other Republicans in June blamed Cantwell’s lack of communication about behind-the-scenes revisions of S-4207 to secure backing from Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and Biden administration-appointed military leaders as a major reason they couldn’t support the bill at that time (see 2406170066). Cantwell earlier this week cited a July 1 FCC report to Congress that found 40% of Secure and Trusted Communications Networks Reimbursement Program participants lacked enough funding to complete removal and replacement of suspect network gear (see 2407020042) as a reason for Congress to move on S-4207.
FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr is widely seen as the favorite to become FCC chair in a second Donald Trump presidency, and former FCC staffers and communications industry officials told us they expect a Carr-led FCC would prioritize policies he wrote about in the telecom chapter of the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025. For example, the chapter lays out plans for rolling back Section 230 protections for tech companies, deregulating broadband infrastructure and restricting Chinese companies.
Skylo Technologies sees a substantial market for satellite-connected IoT devices, Tarun Gupta, Skylo co-founder and chief product officer, said Thursday. Adding satellite coverage to terrestrial service “will really remove the borders of connectivity” and mean no one should worry “do I have coverage here or not?” Gupta said during a Mobile World Live webinar on non-terrestrial networks (NTNs). Other speakers said use cases for NTN are already emerging.
The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is temporarily staying the FCC's net neutrality order until Aug. 5. In an order Friday (docket 24-7000), the three-judge panel granted an administrative stay "to provide sufficient opportunity to consider the merits of the motion to stay" the order. The judges gave a July 19 deadline for filing supplemental briefs regarding the application of the U.S. Supreme Court's 2005 Brand X decision. The FCC didn't immediately comment.
Former President Donald Trump famously doesn't do policy detail, but this time around his senior advisers and self-described MAGA revolutionaries are doing it for him. Trump himself has repeatedly called for punishment of disfavored media, including FCC-licensed "fake news" outlets. But the specifics of the disruptions planned for policy and governance of telecom (along with many other sectors) are most explicitly framed in the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025, the massive policy prescription directed in part by Trump's past and presumably future advisers and appointees. Among contributors is FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr, author of the chapter on the future of the agency and telecom policy as a whole. In this Comm Daily Special Report, published on the eve of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, our award-winning editorial team looks at the ideas and the people that would transform telecom in America if Donald Trump is returned to office. (Our counterpart examination of Democratic plans -- whether under a reelected President Joe Biden or someone else -- will appear in August.)
Six Texas counties remain in the disaster area of Hurricane Beryl, the FCC said in Wednesday’s disaster information reporting system report (see 2407090047). The alert encompasses Brazoria, Chambers, Fort Bend, Galveston, Harris and Matagorda counties. Humble Police Department (Harris County) was down, the report said, and nine public safety answering points are having their calls rerouted. Nearly 20% of cellsites are reported down in the affected counties, an improvement from Tuesday’s 28.7%, and 527,700 cable and wireline subscribers are without service, an improvement from 803,501 on Tuesday. No TV stations were reported down, but five FMs and one AM station were listed as out of service. Tuesday's report listed two FM and two AM stations down.
Electric vehicle (EV) company Tesla sought a waiver of FCC ultra-wideband rules in support of a vehicle positioning system. “Grant of the waiver would help unleash innovation for applications such as EV charging, providing consumers with additional charging options, and would advance United States leadership and interests in the clean energy transition,” an undocketed filing posted Wednesday said. Tesla said the waiver is consistent with the commission’s hand-held UWB rules “because the proposed Tesla operations will not communicate any data other than for the positioning of the vehicle and the transmissions are only for the short duration necessary to align an EV.”
The FCC Office of Engineering and Technology sought comment on a waiver request by Norway's Kontur for ultra-wideband (UWB) devices, a public notice said Wednesday. Kontur requested the commission waive sections 15.503(d), 15.31(c), and 15.521(d), letting Kontur certify and market a UWB device that would operate as a stepped-frequency, continuous-wave-modulated ground penetrating radar (GPR) transmitter. The device “would improve the quality and quantity of information used by a variety of industries,” Kontur said. However, it does not meet the FCC’s definition of a UWB because it's frequency hopping. Comments are due Aug. 9, replies Sept. 10, in docket 24-209.