FCC Union Vows Cooperation With New POTUS but Braces for Schedule F Return
The union representing FCC employees, the National Treasury Employees Union, said it's ready to work with President-elect Donald Trump’s administration but warned that it would oppose efforts against federal workers. The Trump White House is expected to implement plans laid out in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 and the Trump campaign’s Agenda 47, reducing the federal workforce and reclassifying many career civil servants, making it easier to fire and replace them with political appointees, academics and analysts told us. The NTEU “will make every effort to work in good faith” with the Trump administration, said NTEU National President Doreen Greenwald in a release. “However, we are fully prepared to work with our allies in Congress and use all the tools we have to fight any and all actions taken by his administration that would harm frontline federal workers, our ability to represent them or their ability to serve the American people.”
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Communications Daily is required reading for senior executives at top telecom corporations, law firms, lobbying organizations, associations and government agencies (including the FCC). Join them today!
FCC employees “understand that we work side-by-side with each new administration, and we put politics aside,” said Tracy Bridgham, outgoing president of the FCC’s chapter of NTEU, in a joint statement with incoming President William Knowles-Kellett. Bridgham is retiring from the FCC Nov. 29. The FCC Chapter of NTEU “fared quite reasonably under the prior Trump administration," Bridgham and Knowles-Kellett said in a statement. “While the administration issued Schedule F and took other actions that had negative impacts on union activity, our chapter worked with the Chair’s Chief of Staff very successfully to mitigate the adverse conditions created by the pandemic.” FCC employees “all serve the government and our Constitution; we will promote unity and continue to work on a non-partisan basis,” said the FCC Chapter’s statement.
The incoming administration is associated with a number of policies that could affect federal workers at the FCC and other agencies. Trump’s Agenda 47 states that “on Day One” the White House will “re-issue 2020 executive order restoring the president’s authority to fire rogue bureaucrats.” That executive order, the Schedule F reclassification order, would have stripped many federal employees of their civil service protections against being terminated and made it easier to transfer those positions to political appointees. A host of federal employee unions including NTEU opposed the EO, and President Joe Biden reversed it shortly after he took office. In April, the Office of Personnel Management issued a rule intended to prevent Schedule F’s return. It clarified that a federal employee who earned civil service protections against termination will retain them until the worker voluntarily waives them.
Agenda 47 also lays out plans to move as many as 100,000 government positions out of Washington, overhaul agencies and “launch a major crackdown on government leakers who collude with the media to create false narratives, pressing criminal charges when appropriate.” Other plans for the Trump administration calling for the return of Schedule F include the America First Policy Institute’s agenda and Project 2025, which FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr partially authored. Carr is widely seen as the front-runner to become Trump’s FCC chair.
“We are educating our members about some of the potentials of the president-elect’s administration, including Schedule F,” Bridgham and Knowles-Kellett said. “We are committed to protecting the civil service and there are now systems and protections in place to safeguard due process for employees.”
The April OPM order would likely delay efforts by the second Trump administration to reimplement a Schedule F plan, but it won’t prevent them entirely, said American University administrative law professor Jeffrey Lubbers. The order was issued too long ago to be subject to the Congressional Review Act, and so it would likely take another rulemaking to undo it, Lubbers said. That rulemaking “would take a while and presumably be litigated” before it could go into effect, Lubbers said.
Along with reviving Schedule F, the next administration is likely to change the federal workforce through budget and job cuts, said Stand Consult Vice President Roslyn Layton, a member of Trump’s transition team in 2016.
The tax cuts and tariffs that the Trump campaign promised will likely prompt spending cuts for nondefense agencies, Lubbers said. “The only place you can really cut spending these days is the nondefense discretionary part of the budget, so that means reduced budgets for regulators or agencies generally,” he said. “I would think that the budget cuts could certainly be one approach to trying to weaken the regulatory agencies.”
Trump has also said he would appoint SpaceX CEO Elon Musk to oversee government efficiency. Musk has suggested he could cut $2 trillion from the federal government. The “big picture” is that Carr may become chair of the FCC, but Musk “will set key policies at NTIA and FCC on subsidies and spectrum,” said New Street’s Blair Levin, a former FCC chief of staff.
NTIA staff seem “more nervous” than staff at the FCC, “an independent agency with a long history of accommodating bipartisan staff at different levels while generally ensuring that higher level staff are aligned with the chair,” said a top wireless industry lawyer: “Less controversial agencies like the FCC will probably try to avoid political problems and paralyzing staff by focusing on moving forward with the new deregulatory agenda.” A broadcast attorney told us that the FCC has a lot of highly technical positions, without a lot of room for wholesale cuts.
Kristian Stout, director-innovation policy at the International Center for Law & Economics, told us the FCC could be relatively stable, similar to the first Trump administration under Ajit Pai. Carr worked for Pai as an aide and then general counsel before being nominated to the commission.
“Carr has consistently demonstrated a strong interest in working across the aisle, which could provide a stabilizing influence on the FCC’s direction,” Stout said. “His ability to balance priorities and navigate FCC issues with a collaborative mindset could be instrumental in ensuring continuity and productive governance, especially during a period that may otherwise bring significant regulatory shifts.” Stout also noted that Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel has done “commendable work, especially given the complexities she has faced on several high-stakes issues.”
John Strand of Stand Consult in a post-election advisory said the Biden FCC reinstated many of the changes made during the first Trump administration and those will be changed once again. The list of regulations to be overturned “seems longer than in any from an FCC in recent memory,” he said.
“If Trump’s ultimate goal is to shrink the administrative state, it makes little sense to beef it up with thousands of appointees,” Strand said: “There will likely be some strategic nominations and then working with existing situations to make it more efficient. For example, the FCC with just 4 commissioners still made meaningful policy, and an FCC with just 3 commissioners can also work.”