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President-elect Donald Trump’s massive infrastructure package should have $40 of private-sector spending for every $1 of public spending, according to House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI). “A great agency…has public-private partnerships. For every one dollar of federal dollars, there's $40 of private sector spending,” Speaker Ryan said. “We want to leverage as much private-sector dollars as possible to maximize the fixing of our infrastructure.” It’s perhaps the clearest picture to date of whether — and how much — direct federal funding for transportation upgrades may be included in Trump’s promised $1 trillion infrastructure bill. There has been mounting concern, particularly among Democrats and rural Republicans, that relying on private financing would only attract projects that can recoup investment costs through tolls or user fees.

Staffers for the Trump transition team have been meeting with career staff at the White House ahead of Jan 20’s presidential inauguration to outline their plans for shrinking the federal bureaucracy. The changes they propose are dramatic.

Overall, the blueprint being used by Trump’s team would reduce federal spending by $10.5 trillion over 10 years. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting would be privatized, while the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities would be eliminated entirely. At the Department of Justice, the blueprint calls for eliminating the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, Violence Against Women Grants and the Legal Services Corporation and for reducing funding for its Civil Rights and its Environment and Natural Resources divisions. “The Trump Administration needs to reform and cut spending dramatically, and targeting waste like the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities would be a good first step in showing that the Trump Administration is serious about radically reforming the federal budget,” said Brian Darling, a former aide to Paul and a former staffer at the Heritage Foundation.

[Commentary] A week before the transition to the new administration, the Federal Communications Commission’s Wireless Bureau issued a report about mobile “zero-rating” plans, which provide consumers the option of free data usage paid by advertising. This zero-rating kerfuffle exposes that network neutrality has transmogrified from the FCC’s original net neutrality purpose of protecting consumers’ freedom to competitively access and use the legal content, apps, and devices of their choice, to potentially taking away consumer’s freedom to access cost-saving content and apps of their choice on the device of their choice. How can the FCC claim to be pro-consumer, and then tell consumers that more consumer choice, control, and savings are a net neutrality violation?

The dirty little secret that the FCC does not want people to know is that Title II net neutrality is implicit FCC price regulation that by design forces consumers to subsidize corporations, the exact opposite of how the FCC implemented Title II historically before competition, where corporations’ communications bills always subsidized consumers’ communications bills.

[Scott Cleland is president of Precursor LLC.]

President-elect Donald Trump has asked roughly 50 senior Obama Administration officials to remain in their roles in order to "ensure the continuity of government," spokesman Sean Spicer said. The decision comes as Trump is reportedly struggling to fill important posts in his new administration. Among the President Obama holdovers are key national security officials, including Brett McGurk, special envoy to the global coalition fighting the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. The move is somewhat surprising, given President-elect Trump’s repeated criticism of President Obama’s effort to combat the terrorist group. He called the president "the founder of ISIS" during a campaign event last April.

Here are five of the biggest players to watch on technology:

1. Peter Thiel, one of the co-founders of PayPal, was arguably the sole top Silicon Valley executive to have publicly backed Trump during the campaign. He is also reportedly considering a run for governor in California in 2018, in a race that may pit him against another billionaire, the Democratic environmentalist Tom Steyer.
2. Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John Thune (R-SD) will oversee the confirmation process for Trump’s nominees to the Federal Communications Commission and will likely have a say in who is selected to chair the commission. Some of Thune’s legislative priorities could get more traction under the Trump administration, including sharing government-owned wireless spectrum with the private sector, rewriting the Communications Act and expanding broadband access to rural communities.
3. FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai is widely seen as Tom Wheeler’s likely successor as chairman of the FCC. As chairman, Pai will get to set the FCC’s agenda and potentially reverse policies imposed under Wheeler, including net neutrality. Pai has already expressed interest in reevaluating the rules as soon as possible.
4. House Telecommunications Subcommittee Chairman Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) is an outspoken opponent of the net neutrality rules enshrined in the FCC’s Open Internet Order.
5. The Trump transition’s FCC landing team will be in charge of setting the agenda and recommending hires for the new administration when it takes over the agency. The group consists of three scholars from the conservative American Enterprise Institute: Roslyn Layton, Mark Jamison and Jeffrey Eisenach, as well as David Morken, the founder of Republic Wireless and Bandwidth.com. Layton, Jamison and Eisenach are all critics of net neutrality and are generally seen as traditional conservatives when it comes to telecommunications policy.

President-elect Donald Trump signaled a willingness to change his stance against the proposed AT&T-Time Warner merger, saying in an interview that he has not “seen any of the facts.” "I have been on the record in the past of saying it's too big and we have to keep competition,” he said. “So, but other than that, I haven't, you know, I haven't seen any of the facts, yet. I'm sure that will be presented to me and to the people within government."

In a campaign speech in October, Trump said unequivocally that he would oppose the $85.4 billion deal because it would give more power to the mainstream media. "As an example of the power structure I'm fighting, AT&T is buying Time Warner and thus CNN, a deal we will not approve in my administration because it's too much concentration of power in the hands of too few," he said, adding later, "Deals like this destroy democracy." But now that Trump is set to take office, many in Washington whether he is open to softening his position on the merger.

A coalition of tech workers in Silicon Valley will demonstrate outside of Palantir’s headquarters to protest the company’s assistance to the US government in creating a system to track immigrants and foreign travelers entering the country. Documents obtained by the Electronic Privacy Information Center showed that Palantir, based in Palo Alto (CA), could help create a system for “extreme-vetting” of immigrants and foreign travelers entering the US. The company had also reportedly played an undisclosed role in US Customs and Border Protection intelligence. “We want to make it clear that the overall tech community is watching what Palantir does,” said Jason Prado, a software engineer at Facebook and member of the Tech Workers Coalition. The Tech Workers Coalition is organizing the Palantir demonstration. “And we want to hold the tech community overall accountable for the values that we as a community have,” Prado said.

The Tech Workers Coalition has created an online campaign to support their protests, which are apart of the 120 hours of action in the Bay Area, a set of anti-Trump protests invoking Martin Luther King Jr. in the lead up to inauguration day. The Coalition has three primary demands: join other major tech companies in pledging to never create a Muslim registry, disclose steps taken to avoid government overreach and abuse and if this not possible, dismantle databases that could be abused.

Lawmakers will have a shortened, but busy week, ahead of President-elect Donald Trump's inauguration. Congress will be moving into its second week of hearings on Trump's Cabinet nominees, with the tech industry keeping a close eye on his Commerce pick, Wilbur Ross.

Ross will appear before the Senate Commerce Committee on Jan 18, following the delay of his first scheduled hearing, which was pushed back because he had not submitted ethics paperwork. The investor and former banker could have a big impact on tech issues. The Commerce Department is responsible for the National Telecom and Information Administration, the Patent Office, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology -- agencies that closely oversee the tech industry. Ross can expect to field questions about the Privacy Shield, the U.S. legal framework with the EU that allows companies to move data across the Atlantic.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler will be taking a job in communication policy at the Aspen Institute think tank after he steps down from the FCC. Chairman Wheeler will be joining the institute's Communication and Society program as a senior fellow. He is the sixth consecutive FCC head to move to the Aspen Institute after stepping down from the FCC chairmanship. "Throughout my tenure as Chairman, I maintained that network providers have certain responsibilities to their consumers, including access, interconnection, consumer protection, public safety, and national security. I think Aspen's unique platform for dialogue will be an excellent opportunity to address those goals," Chairman Wheeler said.

President-elect Donald Trump refused to take a question from a CNN reporter during his press conference, berating the network for “fake news.” "Your organization is terrible," Trump told CNN’s Jim Acosta when he tried to ask a question. "You're attacking us, can you give us a question?” Acosta replied. "Don't be rude. No, I'm not going to give you a question. You are fake news," President-elect Trump responded, before calling on a reporter from Breitbart.

President-elect Trump also praised media outlets that refrained from reporting on explosive allegations that Russia possesses compromising information about him. “I want to thank a lot of the news organizations here today,” Trump said. “They came out so strongly against that fake news.” “I have great respect for the news and great respect for freedom of the press and all of that, but I will tell you that there were some news organizations with all that was just said that were so professional, so incredibly professional that I’ve just gone up a notch as to what I think of you.”