USF Bill Stalled by GOP Concerns Over Cost Containment
A House bill that would overhaul the Universal Service Fund was supposed to have been marked up Thursday, but instead was slated for another round of hearings after Republicans raised concerns to some of the cost containment measures, Rep. Lee Terry, R-Neb., told us. Terry said House Commerce Committee Ranking Member Joe Barton, R-Texas, asked for another round of hearings because “there had been some major changes."
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Terry, co-sponsoring the measure with Rep. Rick Boucher, D-Va., said he was nonetheless confident a USF reform bill would be marked up and voted out of committee by the end of the year. “We want to set the marker that the House has done the heavy lifting on universal service reform,” Terry said. “We know it’s not going to be signed into law this year … so we're laying the marker down this year.”
Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman, D-Calif., wants to use Thursday’s hearing to “understand how the savings and costs add up under the legislation,” he said. Waxman didn’t commit himself to a timeline.
The back-benchers are more skeptical the bill would move by the close of the year, a Republican aide said. The biggest concern for Republicans is that the bill doesn’t cap the fund. Rep. Cliff Stearns, R-Fla., and Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., raised questions about a cap in their opening statements. “It’s difficult for me to look at the USF and not see a typically, regressive, D.C.-based tax,” Blackburn said, saying she had hoped to use Thursday’s hearing to “re-center” the discussion.
Terry said earlier drafts of the bill had a fund cap in them, but industry pushed back and instead accepted “containment” measures that the FCC could use. “The biggest sticking point is going to be education on my side of the aisle,” he said. “The reality is we want to work with Cliff -- we've been working with Cliff endlessly and obviously we have some work to do. I think we've addressed all of those [issues], so it’s going to be really incumbent upon me to sit down with him and really go through those.”