CSIS REPORT TO RECOMMEND WHITE HOUSE-LEVEL SPECTRUM ADVISER
An upcoming report by the Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS), drafted by a commission led by former Defense Secy. James Schlesinger, will recommend a White House-level body examine spectrum policy. The recommendation has received broad backing from govt., industry and academic participants involved in the drafting. The report, to be released next month, comes as the concept of a White House-level structure to take a broad look at spectrum management has gained traction among federal policymakers, sources said.
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CSIS’s Commission on Spectrum Management, chaired by Schlesinger and former Motorola Chmn. Robert Galvin, held a meeting last summer on spectrum reform issues ranging from reimbursement for govt. agencies that relocated for commercial users to the need for more oversight among federal agencies that had squabbled over spectrum. At that time, Schlesinger raised the possibility that a new entity with oversight could be located in the White House or in Congress. While the final CSIS report is undergoing final editing, the recommendation for such a White House entity won strong backing from its participants and will be part of the final version, said James Lewis, senior fellow and dir.-technology policy at CSIS.
Several sources said Administration officials had studied the creation of a high-level advisory group or council on spectrum in the White House, although the timing of a decision wasn’t clear. If created, such a body is seen as providing an umbrella organization to examine policy in that area across the lines of both the NTIA and the FCC. “It’s under discussion,” an industry source said. “It would be a policy review group probably in the White House under the Executive Office of the President like the Office of Science & Technology Policy.” Another source said the World Radio Conference that starts in June in Geneva helped renew interest in the need for such a group to assess spectrum policy, but the timing was slowed as the National Security Council and others devoted their resources to the war in Iraq.
The CSIS report will contain a recommendation that an area needs to be identified in the White House specifically for spectrum policy, including dispute resolution issues that crop up, as well as for a broad overview of policy, Lewis said. The report itself is broader and is part of a review of spectrum decisionmaking that isn’t focused so much on the nuts and bolts of specific allocation decisions as on process. Acknowledging the fast pace of technological change and the growth in demand for wireless capacity, CSIS said the study was designed to “find ways to balance competing priorities and to improve management of the allocation process.” Lewis said: “It’s more the idea that only the White House will provide discipline to the process and only the White House will make agencies line up and move in a relatively quick fashion.” The recommendation for a White House structure on spectrum issues doesn’t suggest changes in FCC or NTIA authority, he said.
Schlesinger, who also is a former Energy Secy. and was tapped early in this Administration to head a DoD spectrum assessment, a CSIS conference last year had stressed the need for a spectrum oversight role at a high govt. level. He cited “continued squabbling” among federal agencies on spectrum as an “embarrassment” to the Executive Branch. New technologies such as ultra-wideband (UWB) generally are seen as having stressed the current regulatory system, even though the NTIA and the FCC ultimately reached agreements in contentious areas such as potential interference. But industry observers have said that UWB showed the extent to which existing regulatory regimes weren’t geared to the fast pace of emerging technologies. The panel’s agreement on a White House entity was driven in part by a feeling that such challenges “are going to become more and more frequent,” Lewis said.
The idea of an umbrella policy group over existing agencies to look at spectrum broadly has come up in other recent reports. The General Accounting Office (GAO) in Feb. called for an independent federal commission to examine U.S. spectrum management, citing past govt. difficulties in resolving disputes among spectrum users (CD Feb 4 p2). While the NTIA and the FCC recently have undertaken spectrum reform initiatives, including the Commission’s Spectrum Policy Task Force, the GAO said no single agency had ultimate decisionmaking authority over all spectrum. Senate Communications Subcommittee Chmn. Burns (R-Mont.) earlier this year stressed the need for spectrum reform, saying a single agency was needed to conduct more coordinated oversight. At last year’s NTIA Spectrum Management & Policy Summit, potential reforms cited by participants included a possible White House-level entity that would oversee spectrum planning. A Defense Science Board report in 2000 called for a “mechanism within the U.S. government that can develop and administer a national spectrum policy.” It said DoD should work within the federal govt. for the reestablishment of a White House-level Office of Information Resources Policy, similar to the former Office of Telecom Policy.
One source said if a White House-level group were created it ultimately could be similar to a Space Policy Coordinating Committee created by the White House National Security Council and Office of Science & Technology Policy in 2001 to coordinate national space policy matters that affected multiple federal agencies. Last year, President Bush directed the committee to update existing White House directives on space.