What to Expect from the New Trump FCC - A More Polluted Digital Swamp.

[Commentary] President-elect Donald Trump claims that he is going to ‘drain the swamp’ of ‘special interests’. It has not started out well. A recent New York Times article claims, “President-elect Donald J. Trump, who campaigned against the corrupt power of special interests, is filling his transition team with some of the very sort of people who he has complained have too much clout in Washington: corporate consultants and lobbyists.” And the New York Times article features a picture of Dr. Jeffrey Eisenach, front and center.

Eisenach is formerly the founder of a coin-operated group called Progress & Freedom Foundation (PFF), and is now a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute as well as working for the telco-friendly, NERA Economic Consulting as Managing Director Co-Chair, Communications, Media, and Internet Practice. But, as the Times wrote, he also works for Verizon, yet is the head of the transition team to fill the Federal Communications Commission with new staff. “Jeffrey Eisenach, a consultant who has worked for years on behalf of Verizon and other telecommunications clients, is the head of the team that is helping to pick staff members at the Federal Communications Commission.” If Trump is serious about ‘draining the swamp’, then he should worry he is instead creating a new toxic garbage dump, filling it with the same bad actors he claims he wants to clean out.

[Bruce Kushnick is the Executive Director of the New Networks Institute]