The Rural Utilities Service announces the acceptance of applications under the Distance Learning and Telemedicine grant program for fiscal year (FY) 2025, subject to the availability of funding. This notice is being issued prior to passage of a FY 2025 Appropriations Act in order to allow applicants sufficient time to leverage financing, prepare and submit their applications, and give the Agency time to process applications within FY 2025. Based on FY 2024 appropriated funding, the Agency estimates that approximately $40 million will be available for FY 2025. Successful applications will be selected by the Agency for funding and subsequently awarded to the extent that funding may ultimately be made available through appropriations. All applicants are responsible for any expenses incurred in developing their applications.

Federal Communications Commission Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel called for the agency to quickly adopt rules that will allow the FCC to proceed with a spectrum auction to fully fund the removal, replacement, and disposal of insecure Chinese-made Huawei and ZTE equipment and services from U.S. networks without further delay.  The recently passed National Defense Authorization Act provides essential funding for the Secure and Trusted Communications Networks Reimbursement (or “Rip and Replace”) Program by giving the FCC authority to auction AWS-3 spectrum licenses in its inventory.  The AWS-3 auction will be the FCC’s first spectrum auction since its general auction authority lapsed in March of 2023.  With the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking circulated to her colleagues for their consideration, the Chairwoman seeks to start the rulemaking process necessary to run a successful auction to fully fund the “Rip and Replace” program. The Notice of Proposed Rulemaking proposes updates to the service-specific competitive bidding rules to grant licenses for spectrum in the FCC’s inventory in the AWS-3 spectrum bands (generally the 1695-1710 MHz, 1755-1780 MHz, and 2155-2180 MHz bands).  In 2014, the FCC previously assigned the majority of AWS-3 licenses in Auction 97.  Nevertheless, there remains spectrum in these bands that is not currently licensed due to various circumstances. Pursuant to the Congressional mandate, the FCC will now offer licenses for the unassigned AWS-3 spectrum in a new auction.  The Notice also updates the definitions of small and very small businesses in the general part 1 competitive bidding rules to conform with the Small Business Act’s five-year lookback period that has been used in recent spectrum auctions. 

Two Democratic members of the Federal Communications Commission believe Congress should step up and codify network neutrality rules as federal law after the Sixth Circuit shot down the FCC's latest version of the rules. Such a move would finally stop the pendulum swings of the on-again/off-again FCC rules on network neutrality. However, a top policy analyst believes that such thoughts are wishful thinking. Calls by Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel and Commissioner Anna Gomez "to codify the net neutrality rules are highly unlikely to succeed," Blair Levin, a policy analyst at New Street Research and a former FCC official. "We think the odds of Congress acting as requested are zero."