Simington: U.S. Deregulation Needed to Compete With China
FCC Commissioner Nathan Simington said in a podcast interview Tuesday that for the U.S. to compete effectively with China, it needs to remove regulatory barriers to industry. China has given companies such as Huawei “an open door” to acquire land, receive research and development grants, and hire non-Chinese workers, Simington said on Dinesh D’Souza's podcast. In 2024, D’Souza’s book and film questioning the 2020 election -- both called 2000 Mules -- were removed by publisher and broadcaster Salem Media from all platforms after their depictions of voter fraud were found to be false (see 2405310069).
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The leeway that China gives Huawei “amounts to a concession in favor of a strategic industry, what we used to call an industrial policy,” Simington said, contrasting the Chinese approach with the permitting required of U.S. companies seeking to build infrastructure. He said the U.S. shouldn't copy “the worst aspects” of a system that gives a regulatory free pass to companies, but it should consider that “every regulation comes with a cost.”
Simington said he has “high hopes” that the U.S. can turn around its regulatory policy, praising the FCC’s deregulatory direction under Chairman Brendan Carr. “I think we're coming from a good place within my own agency, and the chairman's got a long-established record of success in these areas,” Simington said. “I think that could be a sign for how we should be addressing this in the rest of the United States.” In the U.S., “you can easily find regs that have been on the books 40 years, 50 years, 60 years.” In many cases, “no one” remembers what problem those regulations were meant to solve, he said. “Working around them has become an entire cottage industry that is really nothing but a paperwork-shuffling industry.”