FY2025 Regulatory Fees Order Expected Soon With Little Changed From NPRM
An FCC order on FY 2025 regulatory fees is expected to be unanimously approved soon and will likely contain few surprises, according to industry and FCC officials (see 2506050061). The draft order, circulated to the 10th floor last week, changes how fees are assessed in line with proposals in the June NPRM, but it doesn’t take up calls from broadcasters and satellite companies to expand the base of regulatory fee payors. FCC officials told us they anticipate that the order will be issued in time to allow fees to be paid by the deadline at the end of September.
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The unanimously approved June NPRM proposed collecting $390,192,000 in FY25 fees and reclassifying 61 FCC indirect full-time equivalents (FTEs) as direct FTEs. Indirect FTEs are funded by regulatory fees assessed to all FCC licensees, while direct FTEs are funded only by the licensees of the particular bureau to which they're assigned. The NPRM proposed the reclassification in part because “certain FTE work in the Office of General Counsel, the Office of Economics and Analytics, and the Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau is sufficiently linked to the oversight and regulation of regulatory fee payors in a core bureau.” FCC and industry officials said the draft order’s provisions are little changed from the proposals in the NPRM.
The reshuffling of FTEs proposed in the NPRM would lead to regulatees of the Wireless and Wireline bureaus paying for 23 more direct FTEs each than the prior year, while Media Bureau regulatees would pay for 13 additional FTEs. Those reallocations would mean the agency would collect roughly $7 million in fees from Office of International Affairs payors, $44.8 million from Space Bureau payors, $105.6 million from Wireless Bureau payors, $116.5 million from Wireline Bureau payors, and $116.1 million from Media Bureau payors.
Though NAB and Telesat had called on the FCC to expand the regulatory fee payor base in comments responding to the NPRM (see 2507080044), the order isn’t expected to take steps in that direction, FCC and industry officials told us. NAB said the FCC should collect regulatory fees from broadband service providers, equipment authorization holders and major technology companies because they benefit from FCC-regulated spectrum and other agency functions. Telesat said the FCC should collect from companies affected by equipment authorization, holders of experimental licenses, and the administrators of the databases used by unlicensed devices to prevent interference. Expanding the categories of entities that pay regulatory fees would likely have to be tackled in its own proceeding, separate from the annual fee order, an FCC official told us Thursday.
The circulated draft would also incorporate changes from a June order on fees for satellites and earth stations (see 2506100055). In that order, the agency said licensees would be charged fees on authorized satellites and earth stations instead of only operational ones. It also changed the fee categories for non-geostationary orbit satellites to distinguish between small constellations of fewer than 1,000 authorized satellites and larger, 1,000-plus constellations.