Upcoming policy issue

The House passed, by voice vote, legislation to reauthorize the First Responder Network Authority, which oversees FirstNet, the nationwide first responder network owned and operated by AT&T under a contract with the Commerce Department. The FirstNet Authority will sunset in February 2027 unless Congress reauthorizes it, something that users and lawmakers broadly agree would be disruptive.

During the 30^th anniversary of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the Federal Communications Commission has begun a review of one of the most consequential provisions of the Act—the Commission’s Universal Service Fund. Chairman Brendan Carr says the FCC has begun looking for ways to update each USF component. “Up to now, you’ve seen some efforts on Lifeline, which is the low-income subsidy program.

The House Financial Services and General Government Subcommittee advanced a 2027 funding bill that would provide the Federal Communications Commission with less money than the agency asked for. The bill provides $390.2 million for the FCC, which is $26 million, or 6.2%, less than the FY26 enacted level. The legislation would also:

On April 15, the Federal Communications Commission's Wireline Competition Bureau and the Office of the Managing Director released a public notice seeking input on potential reforms to the operations and management of the Universal Service Administrative Company (USAC). USAC is a subsidiary of the National Exchange Carrier Association (NECA), and is the private not-for-profit corporation created to serve as the administrator of the FCC's Universal Service Fund (USF). USAC’s function is purely administrative.

The Majority Leader of the House of Representatives announces bills that will be considered under suspension of the rules in that chamber. Under suspension, floor debate is limited, all floor amendments are prohibited, points of order against the bill are waived, and final passage requires a two-thirds majority vote. Bills include:

Proposed reforms to a major federal broadband subsidy program are still taking shape on Capitol Hill. Lawmakers are aiming to circulate a discussion draft of legislation that would modernize the $8.5 billion-per-year Universal Service Fund. Meanwhile, the Federal Communications Commission, which manages the fund, is asking for input on whether it should make changes to the nonprofit it delegated accounting and administrative duties to.

The New Mexico broadband office is likely to downsize after it’s done managing the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment program. “In New Mexico, we do have a plan, and I think the plan will be to scale down a little bit,” Aquiles Trujillo, deputy director of the New Mexico Office of Broadband Access & Expansion, said at the Connected America show in Dallas.

For decades, two kinds of scarcity kept the internet safe — or safe enough. Writing software was hard, so the people who did it were trained, careful and few. Finding bugs was also hard, so the worst flaws stayed hidden, sometimes for decades. It wasn’t a great system. But the difficulty on both sides created a kind of détente that held. But publicly available A.I.

Dario,Demis, Elon, Mark and Sam. The five most important people in artificial intelligence are so famous that first names alone are enough to identify them. Politicians and journalists hang on their every word. ChatGPT, run by Sam Altman’s OpenAI, has more than 900m weekly users. Dario Amodei’s Anthropic has developed an AI model so good at hacking it has caused panic among policymakers. Demis Hassabis, head of Google’s AI efforts, has won a Nobel prize for his scientific research.

AI CEOs' lofty pitches for AI governance may end up being pipe dreams in a town that routinely fumbles tech policy. OpenAI's new industrial p