What did he know and when did he know it?
Ah, the immortal question of Sen. Howard Baker of Watergate fame.
That’s what House telecommunications subcommittee Chairman Jack Fields (R-Texas) wanted to know last week of FCC Chairman Reed Hundt’s knowledge about an elusive proposal in an early draft of the universal service rulemaking to supply beepers to homeless people.
Beepergate was a political lynching.
A Republican with waning political influence took advantage of a highly divided FCC, headed by a Clinton Democrat with a penchant for pursuing a personal social agenda and for obfuscating reality.
Having said that, Hundt was set up.
“Has there been or is there now consideration of providing pagers for the homeless?” Fields asked Hundt before a hushed crowd of blood-sporters.
“Pagers for the homeless,” pondered Hundt. “I’m not aware of any such proposal.”
Fields went on to read and paraphrase from the FCC universal service item that is bound by the new telecommunications law: “You seek comments from parties to identify any historically underserved segments of the population and potential services and features. And then there’s a footnote 128 that the Joint Board may consider in addressing the provision of telecommunications services to these highly mobile groups.”
Hundt defended the proposal, pointing to the law’s requirement that local phone service be available to everyone and to Washington state’s experimental program that offered pay phone voice mailboxes to help get the unemployed back to work.
Fields repeated the question.
Hundt: “I haven’t had anyone suggest to me and I haven’t initiated the suggestion that pagers are a useful device for putting people back to work and letting them use the network.”
Commissioner James Quello said his staff told him Hundt’s office did make such a proposal, but he didn’t know whether Hundt knew about the idea that he thought was nutty.
Commissioner Andrew Barrett: “Did I receive that at any point in any draft? Yes, I did. Did I ever have a discussion with the chairman’s staff? No, I did not nor did I ever have a discussion with the chairman about this.”
Commissioner Susan Ness: “I’m not aware of any specific proposal like that.”
Commissioner Rachelle Chong: “I read an early draft of the universal service item and it was suggesting wireless technologies for temporarily displaced persons. I was alarmed by this suggestion because it seemed a little afield from the Act.”
Fields, conceding beepers for the homeless is a noble idea and boasting that supposedly confidential FCC discussions are broadcast throughout Congress, thundered, “This goes far beyond anything that was ever discussed in the universal service area” and that “this type of consideration I consider a distraction. And I consider this flying in the face of what makes sense to the American public.”
That is, an American public described by Hundt in which one of every seven African Americans and one of every eight Hispanics lack telephone service and there are three states where more than 10 percent of the people are not linked to the public network.
“We have a mandate to address these problems,” said Hundt.
“When we read the law it says there should be affordable service offered to everyone in our country. It does not say, `Only some people in our country.”
As for the beeper-for-the-homeless proposal, finger-pointing abounds.
You might say someone was “thinking outside the box.”
