WASHINGTON-The Federal Communications Commission made out better on its fiscal year 2002 budget with the Senate Appropriations Committee than it did with the full House of Representatives.
The House passed the FCC’s FY 2002 budget as part of the overall commerce, justice, state and the judiciary spending bill, but made no changes. As such the House version of the FCC’s budget remained at nearly $238.6 million. This is nearly $10 million below the president’s request, but $9 million more than the agency received for FY 2001.
The Senate Appropriations Committee was kinder to the FCC, giving the agency $4 million more than it requested for a total appropriation of nearly $253 million. The FCC was directed by both the House and the Senate Appropriations Committee to recover nearly $219 million in regulatory fees. The FCC recently lowered the amount the wireless industry must pay in regulatory fees from 30 cents to 27 cents per subscriber.
The committee apparently heeded FCC Chairman Michael K. Powell’s call for more money to beef up the agency’s engineering and technical staff.
“The U.S. communications markets will be characterized predominantly by competition and innovation over the next five years that will greatly reduce the need for direct regulation and increase the need for the FCC to maintain an independent technical engineering and economic expertise,” said the report accompanying the Senate Appropriation’s version.
While there had been rumors that language addressing the PCS licenses of bankrupt NextWave Telecom Inc. would be included in the Senate’s version of the bill, no such language was included. Sen. Ernest F. Hollings (D-S.C.), chairman of both the commerce, justice, state Appropriations subcommittee and the Senate Commerce Committee, said there would be no communications-related language “sneaked in.”
“Everyone is running around here wondering what language we sneaked in. The answer is `none.’ We let the Federal Communications Commission run the telecommunications policy,” said Hollings.
The Senate hopes to pass its version of the FCC’s budget within the next two weeks. Once that is accomplished, a House-Senate conference committee will by convened to work out the differences. This is not likely to happen before September.
