Gov performance

Americans are increasingly confident in the news media and less so in President Donald Trump’s administration after a tumultuous year in US politics that tested the public’s trust in both institutions, according to a Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll released Oct 3. The poll of more than 14,300 people found that the percentage of adults who said they had a “great deal” or “some” confidence in the press rose to 48 percent in September from 39 percent last November. Earlier in 2017, President Trump branded the entire industry as the “enemy of the American people.”

The percentage of those who said they had “hardly any” confidence in the press dropped to 45 percent from 51 percent over the same period. Confidence in Trump’s administration moved in the opposite direction. Reuters/Ipsos, which tracked confidence in major institutions every couple of months after the 2016 presidential election, found in late January that 52 percent of Americans had a “great deal” or “some” confidence in the new president’s executive branch. That dropped to 51 percent in the May survey and to 48 percent in the latest poll. Trump took office in January. In comparison, 57 percent of Americans expressed similar levels of confidence in former Democratic President Barack Obama’s outgoing administration in November.

[Commentary] The greatest concern today for our communications industry might simply be this: Are we prepared to learn from history? Do we want to break the pattern of the past and disrupt the political bargains of yesterday that have lessened free speech (for example, the fairness doctrine) and shielded incumbents from competitive entry (for example, the long-standing power of television broadcasters)? If so, the answer is to stop the intrusive government control that favors some companies over others. It is time to stop “mother may I” regulations.
[Babette Boliek is an associate professor of law and the associate dean of Faculty Research and Development at Pepperdine University School of Law]

[Commentary] The new revelations of widespread use of personal e-mail for official business by Jared Kushner and five other White House advisers are no minor indiscretion. Rather, they represent the latest episode in a critical systems failure in the Trump presidency — one that strikes at the heart of our democracy.

At issue is the Presidential Records Act, a post-Watergate statute Congress enacted to establish public ownership of presidential (and vice-presidential) records. It obligates the White House and those who work there to preserve all records relating to their official duties. Despite these legal requirements, the first eight months of President Trump’s administration have been marked by stories of deleted presidential tweets, by the use within the White House of messaging applications that destroy the contents of messages as soon as they are read, and now by White House staff using personal e-mail accounts to conduct government business. It is now up to the courts to hold the president accountable to those he governs by affirming his and his staff’s obligations to maintain and preserve records. Our democracy itself is at stake.

[Norman Eisen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, is chairman of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and served as chief White House ethics lawyer for President Barack Obama from 2009 to 2011. Anne Weismann is chief FOIA counsel for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington]

[Commentary] It is more important than ever that we have accurate data on how broadband is deployed across the country. Yet many consider the Federal Communications Commission’s existing data to be inaccurate and unreliable.

With the FCC now having launched its 13th annual inquiry into the status of broadband deployment in America, it’s time to recognize we won’t get better deployment data from the commission until we take the politics out of broadband progress reports. While the vast majority of FCC staff are low-level, nonpartisan bureaucrats, bureau chiefs and the commissioners themselves are political appointees. Even without the threat of at-will removal, these appointees remain under strong pressure to toe the party line and adopt policies favored by the politicians who appointed them. Whether or not appointees are consciously aware of such political influence, recent FCC actions reflect an increasingly partisan agenda. If we want our telecom regulator to deliver accurate reports about the state of broadband deployment, we need to take the politics out of broadband progress reports. This means removing the “finding” from Section 706 that triggers further commission action and authority.

As Congress considers further telecom legislation — in the context of FCC reauthorization, net neutrality or a full-scale update to the Communications Act — it should re-examine Section 706 and consider implementing this fix. Maybe then we could finally trust the numbers the technocrats deliver.

[Tom Struble is a technology policy manager with the R Street Institute, a free market think tank]

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai told House Commerce Committee Democrats that there has been no inappropriate coordination between the Trump White House, Sinclair and the FCC over the Sinclair/Tribune merger -- and that there has been no pattern of preferential treatment shown Sinclair in a deal whose vetting has been by the book and on a timetable common to such transactions, including under other regimes.

The chairman said his meetings with the President—there have been two of them—were on the order of a job interview in one instance and a second meeting after he had the job, and neither of which was any issue involving Sinclair Broadcast Group discussed. He did say he had met with Sinclair three times since the November election, but in only one meeting were pending issues discussed and that one was followed by the requisite ex parte notification. Pai also said two members of his staff had met with Sinclair execs as well, with an ex parte filed for the one meeting for which it was required.

[Commentary] Current Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai has recently proposed creating a Bureau of Economics and Data. I have no small amount of instinctive sympathy for his proposal, having myself been part of the Department of Justice Antitrust Division’s then-new Economic Policy Office, now called the Economic Analysis Group, at the beginning of my career. The Office’s goal was to preserve the ability of economists to make policy calls apart from pressures from the lawyers to evaluate cases on the basis of courtroom success.

Nevertheless, while Chairman Pai’s interest in forming a similar organization within the FCC is understandable, as is the support his proposal has received, I do not believe that a such an office of economics is the right fix for the FCC, and may do more harm than good.

[Tim Brennan is a professor of Public Policy and Economics and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He recently served as Chief Economist at the FCC.]

The Government Accountability Office was asked to review Federal Communications Commission’s management of its enforcement program. In this report, GAO addresses: (1) actions FCC has taken in the last 5 years to update its enforcement program, (2) FCC’s enforcement performance goals and measures, and (3) selected stakeholders’ views on FCC’s enforcement program and external communications.

GAO reviewed FCC’s enforcement policies and procedures; analyzed FCC’s performance measures and spoke with officials of similarly sized independent agencies with enforcement missions; and interviewed FCC officials and 22 stakeholders from public and private organizations who were knowledgeable of the Enforcement Bureau and the communications industry. The GAO Recommends: FCC should establish and publish: (1) quantifiable performance goals and related measures for its enforcement program; and (2) a communications strategy outlining its enforcement program for external stakeholders. FCC concurred with the recommendations.

[Commentary] The problem is that the Federal Communications Commission’s annual broadband report, by law, demands both a factual conclusion and a regulatory call to action. Depending on its findings, the agency is required to increase or decrease regulation. As a result, the temptation to slant the report’s findings to support a broader agenda has proven difficult to resist.

The FCC should create an interactive broadband dashboard, one that can be continually updated with the most current information on broadband technologies, speeds, performance and coverage. The dashboard should provide, to paraphrase the old Dragnet TV show, “just the facts.” No opinions about adequacy, timeliness, or what constitutes “reasonable.” The FCC could present the data it collects in ways that enable broadband stakeholders to improve their solutions to deployment issues. The FCC could do the country a huge favor by making sure it gets the facts right and letting stakeholders interpret their meaning — before the commission develops its own policy agenda.

[Larry Downes is project director at the Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy. Blair Levin is a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.]

[Commentary] Promoting universal access to modern communication services and the internet, especially for low-income and disadvantaged Americans, is a noble cause and a pragmatic objective worthy of government support, but the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) Lifeline program is not an effective or efficient means of achieving these goals. We need a better approach to open the doors of digital opportunity to low-income and disadvantaged Americans. Here are four principles for replacing the program with a more effective approach to advancing digital opportunity:

First, federal and state governments should work to reduce barriers to broadband deployment and adoption, and to the efficient functioning of the broadband marketplace, so as to lower prices and increase the availability of affordable broadband services.
Second, regardless of whether Lifeline is replaced or reformed, support should be targeted to those who do not already have service.
Third, the replacement for Lifeline should reflect an assessment of who needs help and of what sort.
Fourth, and finally, it is time to consider a new delivery mechanism, one that involves neither the federal regulatory agency which has so grossly mismanaged the Lifeline program nor the telephone companies that have profited so handsomely from that mismanagement.

[Jeffrey Eisenach was on the Trump FCC Transition team, and is a managing director at NERA Economic Consulting.]

This paper looks back at forty years of US communications policy, and concludes that all of the challenges that were salient when Telecommunications Policy published its first issue—the lack of competition in CPE, long distance, local telephone service, television networks, and multichannel video program distribution—have essentially been addressed. The other technology that has grown in importance since 1976—the Internet—is widely regarded as a raging success.

Although no history is completely uniform, the past forty years illustrates the key considerations underlying the choice between whether to impose access regulations or whether to rely on facilities-based competition. Moreover, the paper considers the important role that US courts have played in promoting competition and consumer welfare. In many cases, timely judicial intervention has forced regulators to retreat from positions that protected incumbents and limited competition. The paper concludes with outlooks on new issues and debates that will continue to arise.