Nine months after Ajit Pai was named the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, the Republican is being praised by some for the new era of productivity he has ushered in at the commission, and criticized by detractors for what they say are efforts to roll back consumer protections.
President Trump designated Pai to lead the FCC in January, in a move that was heralded by fellow Republicans.
Now, telecommunications experts aligned with Pai’s policies say there has been a marked change at the FCC from the previous administration.
“I would wager he’s been the most productive of any FCC chair,” Roslyn Layton, a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a visiting researcher at the Aalborg University Center for Communications, Media and Information Technologies in Denmark, told the Washington Examiner. “He’s removed unnecessary regulations, promoted innovation, and improved public safety.”
Under Pai’s leadership, for example, the FCC adopted nearly 50 items in the first 100 days of the Trump administration, and at least five of those were passed unanimously.
It was an achievement that received little notice, said Layton, who served on the FCC transition team.
“There’s so much backlog,” she said. “The FCC still has telegraph rules on the books, and there’s a tremendous backlog that hasn’t been addressed for 20 years, and he’s been starting that cleanup.”
As chairman, Layton said Pai has improved transparency at the commission’s monthly meetings, including ensuring the public has access to documents up for discussion at the FCC’s open sessions.
Pai’s changes to the structure of the commission’s meetings were also praised by Gus Hurwitz, a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and co-director of the Space, Cyber and Telecommunications Law Program at the University of Nebraska College of Law.
At each FCC meeting, commissioners discuss items all focused on the same topic, which Hurwitz said ensures the panel avoids distractions.
“Going through on that thematic basis has both, at a functional level, given the commission greater ability to focus and not get distracted and, at a motivational level, it’s created exigence for the commission to get everything they want to get done on a certain topic,” Hurwitz told the Washington Examiner.
Hurwitz agreed with Layton’s assessment that the FCC has been productive under Pai’s chairmanship, and he attributed this success to the chairman’s commitment to avoiding distraction not only at the panel’s meetings, but overall.
“He has not allowed himself or the agency to become overwhelmed or get distracted by the high profile political things,” he said. “Net neutrality, the Open Internet Order, that’s a huge issue. It hasn’t been drawing a huge amount of resources as it did with the previous administration.”
Hurwitz also said Pai has managed to successfully navigate a highly partisan landscape. According to the FCC, 80 percent of open meeting items were voted with bipartisan support.
“The commission is actually functional under the chairman,” he said. “It’s getting stuff done, working through a backlog of important issues, getting rid of out-of-date regulations, dealing with current issues, and addressing them. The most remarkable thing is, compared to the previous administration, but even more, generally under Chairman Pai, the commission has been remarkably bipartisan.”
Pai, too, highlighted the productivity of the FCC under his chairmanship during testimony Wednesday before lawmakers on the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Communications and Technology.
In written testimony, Pai said the commission has voted on 63 items at its monthly meetings over the last nine months compared to 102 items in three years under former Chairman Tom Wheeler.
“I appreciate this opportunity to update you on the work of the Federal Communications Commission to advance the public interest,” he said. “That work has been substantial.”
Despite the praise from those aligned with Pai, Democratic lawmakers, commissioners, and advocacy groups have expressed discontent with a number of the chairman’s actions, including efforts to reverse net neutrality.
Net neutrality refers to the set of rules designed to ensure that Internet service providers treat all web content equally by preventing providers from blocking or slowing down traffic from certain websites and services.
“The commission’s agenda under your leadership has already had a profoundly negative effect on our country,” Rep. Mike Doyle, D-Penn., ranking member of the subcommittee, said Wednesday. “From increasing costs on small businesses, driving up the cost of calls to family members in prison, and claiming that wireless broadband is competitive even when people in rural America know it’s not, it seems with every fork in the road, you have chosen the path that leads to higher consumer costs, fewer choices, and less innovation.”
Joshua Stager, government affairs lead at the Open Technology Institute, a project of the think tank New America, said he was optimistic initially about Pai’s chairmanship when he indicated a willingness to pursue bipartisan issues.
But Stager said that optimism has soured.
“We’re not too keen on his first eight months,” Stager told the Washington Examiner. “I think there was, when he first became chairman, some good statements on working on bipartisan issues and kind of avoiding some of the third-rail issues of telecom and tech policy. But those hopes were pretty quickly dashed within the first couple of months.”
The Open Technology Institute issued a progress report in September on Pai’s first eight months as chairman, which criticized Pai for moving to repeal the Open Internet Order, which codified net neutrality, and for supporting a Congressional Review Act resolution that repealed the FCC’s rules on broadband privacy, among other issues.
“We’ve really seen the very clear agenda to roll back vital consumer protections and basically tick off the telecom industry’s wishlist very methodically over the course of a year,” Stager said.
Stager, like many other Democrats, also took issue with the time it took for Pai to address President Trump’s threat this month to revoke licenses of stations that broadcast content he dislikes.
Pai did comment on Trump’s threats days later during an event hosted by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and spoke of his commitment to the First Amendment on Wednesday.
“I have said again and again and again that the First Amendment must be at the heart of our work,” Pai said. “Let me be clear. I stand on the side of the First Amendment. I firmly believe that journalists should adhere to their viewers, their listeners, and their readers, not the dictates of officials in Washington, D.C.”
Stager didn’t take issue with Pai’s specific comments, but rather with the time that passed before the chairman spoke out.
“That’s really what alarms me is how long it takes him to make basic statements,” he said. “I don’t think he needs to say anything more, but he does need to respond to these things a lot sooner, probably the day of or within the day, not a week later.”
Though there are policy differences between Pai’s supporters and detractors, the chairman has been praised for working to prevent robocalls and his commitment to expanding broadband access.
“Chairman Pai has a unique belief in and understanding of the importance of rural broadband connectivity and closing the digital divide,” Hurwitz said. “For him, it’s not just a talking point. It’s not just a political aspiration, but something he understands in a way very few commissioners and chairmen ever have.”
