Snowe Will Grill FCC Nominees on Role of Technical Experts at Commission, Aide Says
Sen. Olympia Snowe will ask the FCC commissioner nominees about their attitude to having more technical expertise at the agency, the Maine Republican’s telecom adviser told us Wednesday. Snowe isn’t opposed in principle to either Ajit Pai or Jessica Rosenworcel (CD Nov 2 p1), but she has long been concerned that the agency employs so few engineers and other technical experts, Matt Hussey said. The commission employs about 300 engineers, less than 15 percent of the payroll, and Pai and Rosenworcel are lawyers, Hussey said.
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By contrast, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is comprised of physicists or engineers, said Hussey, who holds an engineering degree. “We can talk about process changes,” he said about proposed changes to the FCC’s regulatory structure, “but if they still don’t have the expert knowledge … they'll still get the regulations wrong.” An FCC spokesman didn’t comment.
Telecom officials regularly complain to Snowe that they have to spend much of their time at the FCC getting its lawyers caught up on the science of networks, Hussey said. Hussey was a member of the audience at a Mercatus Center panel discussion on FCC reform on Capitol Hill Wednesday.
Mercatus panelist Howard Shelanski understands Snowe’s concerns, said the Georgetown law professor. Yet he said the thrust of the matter was “not the number” of engineers, but “the salience on the eighth floor of the building.” The job of engineers ought to be to “tell the lawyers and economists, ‘You actually don’t know what you're talking about,'” Shelanski said. “It’s not that we need more engineers,” he added. “It’s that we need the engineers to be listened to.”
Navigant Economists principal Jeffrey Eisenach agreed, generally, that “salience” of engineers was critical. If the FCC was doing its job properly, he said on the panel, lawyers could handle the assignments well. Eisenach argued that the best role for government in broadband specifically and telecom generally was to move away from preventative regulation and into antitrust enforcement.