Can the FCC be apolitical? Mark Jamison, part of the new administration’s FCC transition team, says yes, in a way that’s better than it has been before. In an Op Ed for the American Enterprise Institute think tank where he wrapped up a two-year stint as a visiting fellow in December, Jamison says the Commission “has lost its way” and an independent regulatory agency like the FCC “should just do the right thing, regardless of who disagrees.”
Jamison is also director of the University of Florida’s Public Utility Research Center; he says decisions to regulate ISPs as if they were monopoly utilities and to pursue control of set-top boxes have political roots. “The decision to delay a commission vote on Lifeline service so that politicians could lobby commissioners was a shocking display of partisan politics.”
He acknowledges that agencies in D.C. can’t totally leave politics at the front door however, as former Chairman Reed Hundt did, the remaining three commissioners will need to protect the staff from political pressures “and enable the staff to perform expert analyses.”
Jamison, himself an economist, notes that the agency staff is heavily comprised of lawyers, which outnumber economists about 10 to one and engineers about two to one. Former FCC economists he spoke with favor organizing the Commission bureaus by economics, engineering, etc. — similar to a plan put forth by former Chairman Bill Kennard — “rather than outdated industry silos.”
“Such a change would raise the profile of expert analysis, providing the commissioners with more diverse staff opinions and greater substance for decision-making,” writes Jamison. “Capacity building will also be key, as former chairman Michael Powell emphasized.”
January 24, 2017
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