FCC to Hold In-Person Open Meeting Despite Federal Shutdown
The FCC is expected to hold its open meeting Tuesday as scheduled, despite the government shutdown, said Chairman Brendan Carr and other agency officials in interviews. “The plan is to move forward with an in-person October open meeting as scheduled,” an FCC spokesperson told us.
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The October agenda is the FCC's biggest in years, with nine substantive items, and the commissioners' offices have had to prepare and arrange ex parte calls with a limited staff. At the start of the month, Carr’s office allowed commissioners one staffer each, but it has increased the number of aides who can work on items as the meeting approaches, FCC officials told us.
Carr told us Thursday that the commission is experiencing “negative consequences” from the suspension of most of its functions since the shutdown began Oct. 1 (see 2509300060), but “there’s been no issue, from my perspective, in terms of [the commission] getting engaged” with stakeholders on the items on Tuesday's agenda. Carr used similar language during a USTelecom event Thursday and cited the FCC’s suspension of processing license and device certification applications as major effects of the shutdown (see 2510230049).
“I assume you’ll see much more of a skeleton crew at the meeting” than would otherwise be there, “because we’re down significantly in terms of staff,” Carr told us. The agency furloughed 81% of its employees starting Oct. 1 (see 2510010065). But he and his team have “been available [and have] done meetings” with stakeholders about agenda items in the weeks since then. “There’s been plenty of time and opportunity for that” outreach to still occur and for the FCC to fully consider potential changes to the agenda items, Carr said.
Industry officials told us they never expected the FCC to forgo the meeting due to the shutdown, though many were unclear about what form it would take. During a previous shutdown that started in December 2018, the agency determined that it was still required to hold meetings, said Wiley attorney Tom Johnson in an interview. He was the FCC's general counsel at the time. The agency's meeting on Jan. 31, 2019, held just days after that shutdown ended, had no agenda items and lasted less than 20 minutes.
A sunshine notice the FCC released last week appeared to indicate that the upcoming meeting would proceed relatively normally. Going ahead with such a big agenda in the midst of the shutdown “shows that the chairman wants to move forward” on major items like the ATSC 3.0 transition, said Gray Television Senior Vice President Rob Folliard.
The FCC didn’t comment on what funds it's using to pay the staff and security required to hold an open meeting during the shutdown, but in similar instances in the past it has stayed open while other agencies shuttered by relying on application fees and leftover funding from the prior year (see 2309280084). This time, the FCC closed when other agencies did, and industry officials told us that it likely left the agency with funding reserves to prepare for and hold Tuesday's meeting.
The Senate is expected to hold an additional vote in the coming days on the Republicans’ House-passed continuing resolution to reopen federal agencies through Nov. 21 (HR-5371), but it's likely to again fail to reach the 60-vote cloture threshold needed to advance the measure.