March 2017

President Donald Trump has yet to fill many key science and technology positions at the White House, and it's not clear when he will. Under President Barack Obama, the White House chief technology officer's staff included about 24 people. As of the week of March 27, President Trump has named only one person to that office—Michael Kratios, formerly chief of staff to Trump's tech adviser and tech investor Peter Thiel.

The CTO's office is housed within the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy, which also doesn't have a director yet. “The impression this leaves is that Trump isn’t interested in science and that scientific matters are a low priority at the White House,” said Vint Cerf, the Google technologist known as the "father of the internet". President Trump's budget blueprint, released earlier this month, proposed slashing federal research funding at agencies including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and, at the Energy Department, eliminating a research and development unit altogether. Some of President Trump's advisers have recommended eliminating OSTP, which the administration is free to do. White House structure isn't set in law, said Martha Joynt Kumar, director of the White House Transition Project.

[Commentary] Fallout from a vote to roll back the Federal Communications Commission's broadband privacy rules continues to ripple through the US. Gigi Sohn, a former FCC staffer and advisor to previous FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, said, "I think the fervor over this is not going to die down anytime soon," adding, "I think it's going to become an election issue. This is something everybody can understand." The roll back could have broader surveillance fallout as well. At least, that's what law professor Paul Ohm contends in an op-ed for The Washington Post. Not splitting hairs whatsoever, Ohm writes, "Once Trump signs the bill, diminishing the FCC's power to police privacy online, ISPs will feel empowered — perhaps even encouraged – by Republicans (no Democrats voted for this measure) to spy on all of us as they never have before. And spy they will." It's too early to tell whether this week's rollback will ultimately cost Republicans political capital, but for now, the headlines are still humming — right or wrong.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai's proposal to deregulate business data service (BDS) rates—credit card readers, ATMs—of incumbent carriers and not to impose potential new price regulations on competitors including cable operators was drawing a lot of attention in Washington after the chairman signaled the FCC would vote on his BDS item at the April meeting. Former chairman Tom Wheeler ran out of time and support for his BDS revamp, which Pai had issues with. A notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM) under Wheeler was adopted along party lines, but the order was never voted. Pai’s item would be an order based on what he said was lengthy data collection and the input into that NPRM, though critics of his plan were suggesting it was sufficiently different from the NPRM that it should be put out for new comment.