WASHINGTON-The Clinton administration stepped up its campaign to kill provisions in defense bills giving the Pentagon priority access to shared spectrum and to the satellite-based global positioning system, flooding key lawmakers with letters from a wide range of federal agencies.
At the same time, the White House is not backing away from a budget proposal in House and Senate Department of Defense appropriations bills requiring 36 megahertz of spectrum be auctioned this year instead of after Jan. 1, 2001.
While the wireless industry is unified in opposition to DOD spectrum priority and GPS provisions, carriers are split on the accelerated auction issue.
Despite the administration’s frontal attack on House and Senate DOD authorization bills, there is little sign lawmakers who oversee the Pentagon are backing down. The few concessions offered by the Senate Armed Services Committee in past weeks have been shot down by industry for being too limited, according to sources.
Now, however, staff from House and Senate Commerce Committees-authorizing panels that make telecom policy-are getting more involved in negotiations.
The Senate DOD authorization bill, which includes DOD spectrum supremacy provisions, is in conference committee, where lawmakers are attempting to reconcile that bill with a companion House measure that includes the controversial GPS measure.
“This bill could have a negative impact on the U.S. Secret Service’s ability to provide protection to the president and vice president as well as visiting dignitaries,” said Treasury Undersecretary James E. Johnson in a July 15 letter to Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John Warner (R-Va.).
The correspondence was sent to Rep. Tillie Fowler (R-Fla.), chairwoman of the House Transpiration subcommittee on oversight, investigations and emergency management.
G. Clay Hollister, executive associate director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, cautioned that DOD spectrum provisions could seriously degrade FEMA’s ability to effectively respond to its all-hazards mission.
Less dramatic are comments offered by other government agencies, which also warned of problems if Senate DOD-friendly spectrum provisions are approved by conferees.
“If enacted, these provisions would erode the current system of domestic and international spectrum management to the detriment of federal agencies, state and local governments, and the private sector,” said Commerce Secretary William Daley wrote Warner.
John Berry, assistant secretary for policy at the Interior Department, told Senate Energy Committee Chairman Frank Murkowski (R-Alaska) the controversial spectrum provisions “will mean public-safety communications become secondary to the DOD use of spectrum for peacetime training and exercise operations.”
The scientific community is up in arms about the DOD bills, too.
“Shifting the current system of managing the spectrum to one that gives primacy to the Department of Defense could deny astronomers’ all over the world opportunities to conduct investigations at U.S. facilities based on these cosmic signals. It would replace a system of proven utility with one that contains many uncertainties,” said Joseph Bordogna, deputy director of the National Science Foundation.
