Summary of Nomination Hearing for Commissioner O'Rielly

The Senate Commerce Committee held a nomination hearing on June 16 that featured Federal Communications Commissioner Michael O'Rielly. Commissioner O'Rielly's term expired at the end of June 2019, but commissioners can continue to serve until the close of the next Congress. The new term would date from July 1, 2019. 

Senators brought up the upcoming Rural 5G Fund — a proposal to give out up to $9 billion over a decade for 5G buildouts. Commissioner O'Rielly signaled to the committee that he won't vote on a final order before the FCC comes up with new availability maps as directed by Congress. "[U]nlike the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) proceeding which was already in motion prior to the passage of the Broadband DATA Act, the Rural 5G Fund mechanism appears to be within the ambit of a 'new award of funding' for which the FCC would need to use the statutorily-required maps," he said when he voted for the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking back in April. At the hearing, Commissioner O'Rielly said that if Committee Chairman Roger Wicker's (R-MS) position as one of the authors of the Broadband DATA Act, which required new maps, was that the FCC could not proceed without them, then he agreed.

Chairman Wicker also brought up the debate over allowing Ligado to use satellite spectrum for a planned terrestrial broadband network, despite potential GPS interference. Commissioner O'Rielly defended the FCC's Ligado decision, saying the FCC's engineers had vetted it thoroughly and with the safeguards the FCC put in place at the outset — including a kill switch for the Ligado service if it did interfere — he was confident Ligado would not cause harmful interference to GPS. 

Sen Dan Sullivan (R-AK) expressed his unhappiness over the FCC's cut to some Alaska telehealth funding a couple years back. Sen Sullivan said he was strongly supportive of Commissioner O'Rielly's renomination, but lit into FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, and even suggested maybe the FCC needed a new chairman. Sen Sullivan said Chairman Pai had "clawed back" with "no transparency or opaqueness Universal Service telehealth programs in my state." He said his state had essentially written the book on telehealth "and yet we have a chairman of the FCC that seems hell-bent on collapsing that system in Alaska." A spokesperson for FCC Chairman Ajit Pai countered that the FCC was focused on providers, not carriers, including saying the clawback was about money Liberty-owned GCI should not have gotten.