Gov performance

On June 15, 2018, Federal Communications Commissioner Michael O'Rielly wrote to Gov Gina Raimondo (D-RI) and Rhode Island General Assembly Speaker of the House Nicholas Mattiello (D-RI-15) to follow-up on the issue of 9-1-1 fee diversion. He wrote, "To put it bluntly, your state is diverting 60 percent of the funds intended and necessary for public safety purposes to your general fund, and no amount of relabeling will resolve this reality...I am writing, again, to implore you to end Rhode Island's fee diversion practices." 

On June 19, 2018, Federal Communications Commissioner Michael O'Rielly wrote to Charles Salle, Deputy Director of the New Mexico Legislative Finance Committee. He was responding to a phone call Commissioner O'Rielly received addressing why the state of NM diverted 9-1-1 fees in 2016.

Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz and FBI Director Christopher A. Wray faced lawmakers to defend a report on the FBI’s investigation of Hillary Clinton’s e-mails, which rebuked the conduct of former director James B.

President Donald Trump said that he had been “totally exonerated” by a new Justice Department report that is highly critical of several key FBI figures in the Hillary Clinton email probe, including former FBI Director James Comey. The report by the department’s inspector general offered no findings regarding the ongoing investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller III into possible coordination between Russia and Trump’s campaign in the 2016 election.

Former FBI director James B. Comey was “insubordinate” in his handling of the investigation of Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential election, a critical Justice Department report concluded on June 14.  But the report, by the department’s inspector general, Michael Horowitz, does not challenge the decision not to prosecute Clinton. Nor does it conclude that political bias at the FBI influenced that decision, the officials said. “We found no evidence that the conclusions by department prosecutors were affected by bias or other improper considerations,” the report said.

National Telecommunications & Information Administration administrator David Redl warned Congress that the "security and stability" or the internet are at risk due to pressure to comply with the European Union's new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which went into effect May 25. That warning came June 13 in the Senate Commerce Committee's first oversight hearing of the NTIA under Redl, its new administrator.  Committee Chairman John Thune (R-SD) said the committee was also looking at the GDPR and would seek Redl's input.

When Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai decided to do away with the widely popular “network neutrality” rules that governed the Internet, his justification was that the regulations were slowing deployment. But a new analysis by the Center for Public Integrity plus other factors cited by industry experts show that reasoning to be shallow at best and ridiculous at worst.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai (in)famously said, “We need to fire up the weed whacker and remove those rules that are holding back investment, innovation, and job creation.” On June 1, 2018, we learned a bit about how far follow-Republican FCC Commissioner Michael O’Rielly is willing to go to cut back consumer protections. In FCC Regulatory Free Arena, Commissioner O’Rielly highlights the pervasiveness of the “app economy” to argue that traditional companies regulated by the FCC should seek to be released from their regulatory obligations.

A push by a cohort of Democratic Reps to reinstate the Office of Technology Assessment failed on the House floor June 8. The office was created in 1972 to offer bipartisan advice and assistance to lawmakers on difficult technical issues. It was later defunded in 1995 by a Republican Congress that considered its work redundant. 7 Democratic Reps introduced an amendment to reinstate the defunct office. The amendment was added to an appropriations bill to fund energy and water programs, military construction, the Veterans Affairs Department and legislative branch for fiscal 2019.

It’s been four months since my colleague, Federal Communications Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel, and I penned an op-ed reaffirming the need and accompanying reasons to stop states from diverting critical 9-1-1 fees collected from consumers to non-9-1-1 functions.  After such time, it seems appropriate to ask: have things improved?  In reality, the effort to end 9-1-1 fee diversion has had mixed results.