House Communications Subcommittee ranking member Doris Matsui, D-Calif., said Monday that she, Vice Chairman Rick Allen, R-Ga., and Rep. Tim Walberg, R-Mich., refiled the Future Uses of Technology Upholding Reliable and Enhanced Networks Act. The measure, which passed the House in past Congresses (see 2409180049), would direct the FCC to establish a 6G task force that provides recommendations about ensuring U.S. leadership in developing that technology’s standards. House leaders included the Future Networks Act in an ultimately scuttled December continuing resolution, which would have also enacted several other telecom measures (see 2412170081).
The National Treasury Employees Union, which represents FCC staff, has sued President Donald Trump, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr and the leaders of numerous other federal agencies over Thursday’s executive order ending collective bargaining for many federal employees (see 2503280044). Under that order, federal agencies will cease recognizing NTEU as representatives for their employees and will stop the payroll deductions federal workers have requested to pay their union dues, “cutting off more than half of NTEU’s revenue stream,” the group said in the complaint, filed Monday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia (docket 1:25-cv-00935). The order eliminates union rights “for two-thirds of the entire federal workforce” and “is in direct conflict” with laws passed by Congress to facilitate collective bargaining for federal workers, NTEU said in a news release Monday. The national security exemptions to the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act cited in the order have never before been used to deny entire Cabinet-level agencies collective bargaining rights, “only discrete offices within agencies that clearly perform primarily security or intelligence work,” NTEU said. “NTEU-represented employees at FCC do not primarily perform security, investigative, or intelligence work,” it said. “They review and act on license applications for radio, enforce FCC rules regarding construction and operation of communications systems, and respond to consumer inquiries.” The FCC didn’t comment. NTEU has represented FCC employees since 1978. Their current collective bargaining agreement took effect in March 2023 and wasn’t set to expire until March 2030.
As the FCC considers a tiered approach to non-geostationary orbit (NGSO) constellations' regulatory fees, it isn't finding consensus about where to draw the lines. That's according to comments last week in docket 24-85 as the agency solicits input on ideas raised during the FY 2024 space regulatory fee proceeding (see 2502260017).
The House Commerce Committee's Democratic leaders said Monday that they have launched an investigation into FCC Chairman Brendan Carr’s “attacks on the First Amendment and his weaponization of the independent agency,” including multiple broadcaster probes he has initiated since taking over Jan. 20 (see 2502130060). Meanwhile, House Communications Subcommittee Chairman Richard Hudson of North Carolina and 72 other Republican lawmakers are urging the FCC to “modernize” its “outdated” broadcast ownership rules to remove “undue constraints on broadcasters’ ability to innovate and invest in local content.”
The FCC made few but potentially significant changes to a Further NPRM on 911 wireless location accuracy that commissioners approved 4-0 on Thursday (see 2503270042). An FNPRM on next-generation 911 was also tweaked, based on a side-by-side comparison of the FNPRMs. Both were posted in Monday’s Daily Digest.
Instead of alternatives to GPS for positioning, navigation and timing (PNT), the GPS Innovation Alliance (GPSIA) prefers discussing “complementary PNT,” Executive Director Lisa Dyer said in an interview. The FCC, meanwhile, released the final version of its notice of inquiry, approved 4-0 by commissioners on Thursday (see 2503270042), adding questions not proposed in the draft.
Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission appoints Matthew Homsher as secretary, effective April 19, replacing Rosemary Chiavetta, retiring … Correction: Retiring from FCC Wireline Bureau is Suzanne Yelen (see 2503270070).
Regulatory fees for satellite and earth station licensing should be approved in a way that looks to the future, SpaceX said in comments posted Friday. Filings on a February Further NPRM were due Thursday in docket 24-85 (see 2502260017). SpaceX, a company led by Trump administration adviser Elon Musk, said “any changes to the existing framework” must meet what FCC Chairman Brendan Carr calls the “Gretsky [sic] Test.” NHL Hall of Famer Wayne Gretzky advised skating “to where the puck is going, not where it has been,” SpaceX noted.
The FCC should allow low-power TV (LPTV) broadcasters to use the 5G Broadcast transmission standard on a voluntary basis, said broadcaster HC2 in a petition for rulemaking Friday. The technology “allows an LPTV station to transmit a single 5G signal to its entire service area, which can be received by any compatible mobile device,” the petition said. “5G Broadcast thus provides both the spectrum efficiency of the one-to-many structure of broadcast operations and access to compatible mobile devices on existing 5G networks.” Currently, stations can only broadcast in the standard using an experimental license granted by the FCC, and only a few such stations exist.
FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez is asking the Enforcement Bureau to investigate scam calls targeting San Francisco’s Chinese community, one of which involved a scammer posing as a Mandarin-speaking FCC employee. “This is why it's so important for government to continue to reach communities who may be targets of these sophisticated scams in the languages they speak,” Gomez posted Friday on X. The call is part of a wave of scams in March involving callers posing as police officers and health care providers, said the San Francisco Police Department in an online warning. In many instances, the caller posed as a Chinese health care provider and convinced the recipient that someone had submitted their personal data to make a health care claim in China. "The suspects then transferred the calls to other suspects, who claimed to be police officers from a city in China. The suspects claimed they wanted to file police reports for the victims’ compromised personal information,” SFPD said. This eventually led to callers being persuaded to use apps like Skype for video calls with people dressed as police officers as part of the scam, it said. In the incident with the false FCC employee, the scammer connected the victim “to several suspects posing as different Chinese police officers in multiple Chinese cities,” and the victim was eventually persuaded to wire $23,000 to clear their name of a supposed crime.