WASHINGTON-Larry Irving, telecom adviser to President Clinton, last week said a 1993 bill transferring government spectrum to the Federal Communications Commission has been a failure.
“I don’t know what happens to the spectrum. It goes into a dark hole. I don’t know what the FCC is doing with it,” Irving told the House telecommunications subcommittee.
Irving said the FCC has raised only $14 million from the 195 megahertz received from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration so far. Yet the Pentagon’s cost of relocating radio communications facilities to other bands-as a result of the 1993 reallocation mandate-is $1 billion, he explained.
The 1993 law, which also authorized spectrum auctions, was passed by the then-Democratic controlled Congress.
“I think you have to ask yourself today whether we have a spectrum policy,” said Col. Richard Skinner, assistant deputy secretary of defense. Skinner said the Pentagon needs spectrum more than ever in the post-Cold War era. Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.), ranking minority member of the telecom subcommittee, said spectrum policy has been driven by administration and congressional budgeteers in recent years.
Irving said the draft bill’s $11 million authorization for NTIA falls woefully short of the $17.2 million requested by President Clinton for fiscal year 2000. “We’re stretched,” said Irving, who is expected to resign by year’s end.
The telecom subcommittee is considering a bill to reform NTIA, which Irving heads.
The measure would kill NTIA’s telecom grant program, privatize the agency’s Boulder, Colo., laboratory and force federal agencies to completely reimburse for NTIA spectrum-related assistance.
Today, NTIA-which manages federal government spectrum-subsidizes other federal agencies to the tune of 20 percent.
But the NTIA reauthorization proposal, penned by House telecommunications subcommittee Chairman Billy Tauzin (R-La.), is likely to undergo major changes.
Despite problems with NTIA’s Telecommunications Information Infrastructure Assistance Program, there appears to be enough bipartisan support to save it. Somewhat insulating TIIAP from partisan attack is the fact that states represented by Republicans and Democrats on the subcommittee have been beneficiaries of the grants.
It came out at the hearing that a TIIAP program established in Oklahoma in 1996, called OK-FIRST (Oklahoma First-response Information Resource System using Telecommunications), played a key role in giving early warning of the monstrous tornado that flattened parts of that state earlier this month.
Tauzin, saying he wants to pass an NTIA reauthorization bill this year, expressed competitive concerns about United Parcel Service having to buy spectrum the U.S. Postal Service gets for free from NTIA. Irving said the law requires him to assign frequencies to federal agencies, like the postal service.
