Agenda

The Supreme Court allowed President Trump to fire a leader of the Federal Trade Commission, setting up a court battle over a 90-year-old limit on executive power over independent agencies. In an emergency order, a divided court announced that it would allow President Trump, for now, to fire FTC Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, and that it would hear argument in the case in December.

Starting on September 27, 2024, Western North Carolina (WNC) was battered by wind and flooding from Hurricane Helene, the costliest natural disaster in North Carolina history.

The United States is about to make the largest broadband investment in our country’s history. This investment—the $42 billion Broadband, Equity, Access, and Deployment Program, or BEAD—has the potential to drive high-quality, affordable broadband to every last home and business in rural America. But BEAD’s historic levels of deployment will put historic pressure on permitting authorities. And this is especially true in rural areas, where permitting capacity is lowest and BEAD activity will be highest. Such permitting bottlenecks are a fundamental threat to BEAD’s success.

Community-driven outcomes contracts (CDOCs) focus on advancing social outcomes in Indigenous communities, including in areas such as health, housing, and energy security. Like other outcomes-based financing models, CDOCs aim to attract private capital by linking repayments to investors to the achievement of measurable socially beneficial outcomes. They depart from traditional models, however, in the way in which they define those outcomes and develop solutions. CDOCs’ broad philosophy is to shift money and power into the hands of the communities most affected by social challenges.

Brendan Carr, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, which is the nation’s top watchdog over the broadcast industry, was at the center of a media storm on Sept 17. In an interview on a right-wing podcast, Chairman Carr criticized comments that late night host Jimmy Kimmel had made about the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.

When the Supreme Court released its decision in June 2025 declaring that the Universal Service Fund is constitutional, telecommunications and broadband industry groups breathed a collective sigh of relief while also calling on Congress once again to pass reforms to strengthen and improve the USF, which supports several high-cost and low-income telecommunications programs to the tune of $8 billion/year.

The Universal Service Fund should emphasize ongoing operational support for rural internet service providers rather than one-time construction funding, several rural broadband trade groups told lawmakers. “Unfortunately, at times in the past discussion surrounding the High-Cost Fund has focused so much upon construction—the question of initial network availability—that it has become confused with grants.

Many of you know my creed in leadership that we all have a finite time to leave our world better than we found it. And part of that recognition is knowing when the time has come in the life cycle of an organization to have fresh leadership, perspective, vision and a longer runway to get the job done. While this is a bittersweet message to deliver, this is the right time for our industry to make that change. We just came through a crisis over the past four years where we didn’t know if the essential Universal Service Fund would survive. But through our hard work together, it did.

To preserve E-Rate’s legacy while adapting to today’s challenges, SETDA and CoSN respectfully recommend Congress and the USF Working Group to: