The Trump Administration Goes to War on 5G — With Itself

Perhaps the most impressive thing about 5G – the next generation of wireless technology — is that it manages to bridge the hyper-partisan divide in Washington (DC). Democrats and Republicans — including President Trump himself —  support Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai’s “5G Fast Plan” to open huge swaths of wireless spectrum necessary to support 5G technology and “win the 5G race” with China. It may, therefore, surprise you that the greatest resistance to the FCC’s 5G plan comes from within the Trump Administration itself. Federal agencies have mounted an increasingly public campaign against the FCC, declaring in ever more urgent terms how every FCC spectrum decision puts critical services at risk.

Things have now come to an all-out war between the Department of Defense and the FCC over the decision by the FCC to approve a new 5G network by a company called Ligado. The Defense Department claims Ligado’s operation will interfere with vital GPS operations. (The DoD runs the nation’s GPS satellites for military operations, despite the public’s ubiquitous use of GPS.) This has become a proxy for the general civil war on 5G within the Trump Administration and Congress, with cabinet secretaries publicly contradicting each other and members of the Senate and House Armed Services Committees feuding with members of the Commerce Committee (which has jurisdiction over the FCC). Unless contained, this 5G civil war threatens to paralyze the rollout of new spectrum for 5G.