Disbanding CSMAC Makes No Sense With Spectrum Issues Looming: Experts
Industry experts are criticizing the Trump administration’s decision last week to ax the Commerce Spectrum Management Advisory Committee, which has long worked on more complicated spectrum issues, including sharing (see 2509300065). A CSMAC member said the decision was unexpected since potential members of the reconstituted group had undergone enhanced security and background checks, even more than was done for previous CSMACs. NTIA decided to dedicate its resources to other issues, a spokesperson said last week about the CSMAC decision (see 2510010034).
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“This is one more step in the complete and total breakdown of thoughtful spectrum decision-making,” said a longtime CSMAC watcher. The battle is now being fought between carriers and DOD and playing out in the Senate Commerce and Armed Services committees, this person said.
Public Knowledge Senior Vice President Harold Feld, a former CSMAC member, also slammed the decision. “If the only concern you have for spectrum policy is how to find spectrum and auction it, you don't need an advisory committee to look at tough questions that take time to answer,” Feld said Monday. “If you expect the process of finding federal bands to be messy, the last thing you want is a committee of diverse stakeholders offering their advice.”
The move was “shortsighted” because even after the NTIA decides what bands it wants to auction, “it will still have to manage federal spectrum, and the difficult issues will persist,” Feld said. “They could have mothballed the CSMAC rather than disbanded it. But it is consistent with this administration generally that if they do not see an immediate use for something federal, they get rid of it.”
A longtime CSMAC member agreed. The NTIA statement “makes no sense in that it says CSMAC made valuable contributions, and now, with NTIA’s limited resources, they no longer have the ability to supplement those resources with the valuable free consulting assistance from CSMAC,” the person said. NTIA has “big spectrum issues to resolve” and had “a proven way to resolve them though CSMAC.”
Others defended NTIA's decision.
Mary Brown, a wireless consultant with Salt Point Strategies, noted that federal agencies have taken deep dives into spectrum issues, including the NTIA’s recent recommendation supporting commercial use of the upper C band.
“CSMAC’s most important function has been to build consensus around how commercial technologies operate so that the federal agencies can make informed judgments about sharing and clearing federal spectrum,” Brown said in an email. “NTIA may have reasonably concluded that there is less of an immediate need for CSMAC inputs, as federal agency expertise in commercial wireless deployments has become more sophisticated.”
The agency has other options, Free State Foundation President Randolph May said in an email. “The CSMAC may have been helpful at times in the past, and may have been composed of members with significant expertise and experience.” But, he said, it’s also true that “by statute and institutional design, the advisory process is cumbersome, time-consuming, and not always conducive to clear-cut implementable decisions.”
Robert Weller, NAB's vice president for spectrum policy and a CSMAC member since 2017, said in an email that the committee produced reports and recommendations with “reference-level shelf life.” The work of NTIA more generally and its Office of Spectrum Management has “increased dramatically with the short-lead time requirements in the [reconciliation package] and no additional resources were provided,” he said. “I understand the need to prioritize that work.”
Weller said he hopes NTIA finds “other ways to continue to seek the sorts of balanced outside advice that CSMAC provided.”
The Commerce Department established CSMAC in 2004, and “we thought it was an important tool for collaboration between industry and [federal] users,” said John Kneuer, former NTIA administrator under President George W. Bush.
Joe Kane, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation's director of broadband and spectrum policy, similarly said the committee was “an important source of industry and academic input, as well as a convening point for substantive work on technical capabilities and how they could contribute to spectrum productivity.” Some of CSMAC’s work could move to the National Spectrum Consortium and other forums, he said. It’s “important to keep the technological and economic capabilities of academia and industry involved” as the administration implements the spectrum provisions of the reconciliation act.