FCC Approves Order on FY 2025 Regulatory Fees
The FCC unanimously approved an FY 2025 regulatory fee order Thursday that hewed closely to the agency’s June NPRM. The order, released Friday, reclassifies 61 indirect full-time equivalents (FTEs) as direct FTEs but rejects calls to create new categories of regulatory fee payors. The FCC will add a new fee category only when “significant FTE resources of a core bureau are being spent on oversight and regulatory activities with respect to a specific service,” the order said. “Such circumstances have not been presented here.” The order will take effect upon publication in the Federal Register, and fees will be due by Sept. 30, the end of the fiscal year.
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As was proposed in the NPRM, the order adds 23 more direct FTEs each to the Wireless and Wireline bureaus, 13 more direct FTEs to the Media Bureau, and 2 direct FTEs to the Space Bureau. “When we discuss FTEs, we are not referring to any particular employee at the Commission but rather an amount of work performed annually by a full time employee or employees,” it said. The reclassification is intended to address work done by non-core bureaus, such as the Office of General Counsel and Office of Economics and Analytics, that primarily involves regulation of core bureau regulatees, the order said. Space Bureau regulatory fee payors will make up 11.5% of the total fees collected by the agency, with roughly 27.1% more coming from Wireless Bureau payors and about 30% each from Wireline and Media Bureau payors.
The FCC didn’t create any new regulatory fee categories because the proposals for new categories weren’t “fair, administrable, and sustainable,” the order said. Calls from NAB to collect fees from tech companies and broadband service providers have been rejected by the agency already, it said. “Claims that large technology companies ‘benefit significantly’ from the Commission’s work -- presumably work promoting the deployment of broadband upon which they rely to reach consumers -- are not sufficient.” If receiving benefits from broadband were enough to require regulatory fees, the agency would have to collect them from ordinary consumers, the order argued.
Adding new categories for tech companies and broadband services likely wouldn’t change the number of Media Bureau FTEs working on broadcast matters, the agency said. Instead, the FCC’s media deregulation efforts “should, over time, result in decreased regulatory fees for Media Bureau regulatees” as the relaxed rules “reduce the amount of time and effort Commission FTEs must devote to regulating the industry.” The FCC "is right to reject [NAB's] flawed proposal to assess regulatory fees on technology companies," said Rachel Nemeth, the Consumer Technology Association's senior director of regulatory affairs, in a post on X.
The FCC also rejected NAB’s call to hold industry stakeholder roundtables on reforming regulatory fees. “Hosting a forum for parties to rehash comments from prior years or to explore the granular details of the Commission’s FTE work assignments and burdens is unlikely to persuade the Commission to adopt a new fee category.”
In addition, the order rejected proposals from NAB and Telesat to collect regulatory fees from equipment authorization holders. Equipment authorization work “benefits the Commission and the industry as a whole and is not specifically focused on the regulatory fee payors and licensees of a specific core bureau,” it said. Telesat’s proposal to collect fees from experimental licenses was impractical and didn’t convince the agency that such licenses are sufficiently similar to actual FCC licenses, the order added.
The FY 2025 regulatory fees order incorporated authorized earth station and satellite terms that were adopted in June's regulatory fees order (see 2506100055). Also adopted in June and incorporated in the FY25 fees order is a split of the fee category for non-geostationary orbit satellites into two: one for small constellations of less than 1,000 satellites and one for large constellations of 1,000 or more.
The FCC charging regulatory fees for satellite and earth stations when they are authorized, rather than when they are certified to be operational, will start with FY25 fees. There are "significant" staff burdens involved with licensing satellites and earth stations even before they become operational, the agency said in the FY25 order. If the authorized satellite never becomes operational, those burdens never get recovered and have to be borne by satellites that are operational, it noted.