That FCC staffer Sharon Stewart was regularly exposed to pornography at work over six years, despite pleas to a co-worker to stop loudly watching on his workplace computer, is proof enough of a severe and pervasive issue creating a hostile work environment, Stewart said Friday in an opposition (in Pacer) to the FCC's bid for summary judgment on her workplace retaliation lawsuit (see 1701300014). Stewart said the FCC conceded that coordinating Communications Act Section 610 reports was a major part of her job and could have led to a grade increase, until that work was taken from her after she filed an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaint. Stewart said her supervisor knew about her complaints but did nothing to address them and never spoke to her about how the issue might have affected her work after an FCC Office of the Inspector General investigation confirmed the pornography viewing. Stewart disputed the agency argument she hadn't exhausted her administrative remedies since she brought all of her complaints to the FCC's attention during the EEOC administrative process and said she was within her rights to withdraw her request for an EEOC hearing in good faith to file the litigation. The commission didn't comment Monday.

The Trump administration is alerting agencies of top-line discretionary spending numbers for FY 2018 funding starting Monday, Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney told reporters at a White House news conference. The administration is upping defense spending by $54 billion, up to $603 billion, and cutting nondefense spending by that same amount, Mulvaney said. The cutting “reduces duplicative programs” and “programs that simply don’t work,” he said. “This is not a full-blown budget. That will not come until May.” The rise in defense spending "will be offset and paid for finding greater savings and efficiencies across the federal government,” President Donald Trump said Monday during a meeting with governors. The administration will strive to supply a looser budget outline to Congress by March 16, fitting with earlier rough anticipated timelines, and a full budget by the “first part of May,” Mulvaney said. The budget planning now doesn't address certain programs such as infrastructure, he said. The broader infrastructure discussions are ongoing and will likely happen outside the budget process, Spicer said. “I know there’s a lot of discussion” on public-private partnerships “in terms of the funding mechanism,” Spicer said. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., speaking at an event Monday, said "if it's tax breaks, we're not going to be for it," an infrastructure funding "nonstarter" that Schumer has communicated to Trump. "It should be paid for," Schumer said. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said Democrats would back inclusion of broadband, speaking at the same event. Capitol Hill Democrats warned against the level of cutting floated Monday. “A $54 billion cut will do far-reaching and long-lasting damage to our ability to meet the needs of the American people and win the jobs of the future,” Pelosi said. Schumer said the cuts would put a burden on the middle class. Spokespeople for entities including the Commerce Department, the FCC and the CPB (see 1702270058) didn’t comment Monday on what the top-line numbers may mean for their operations.

FCC Commissioner Mike O’Rielly welcomed the opportunity take a new look at proposed ISP privacy rules. O’Rielly wrote Monday on the process Chairman Ajit Pai unveiled Friday, giving fellow commissioners until Thursday to weigh in on a proposed stay of parts of the rules (see 1702240055). “As I indicated in my dissenting statement when the previous Commission adopted these rules, I believe they are fatally flawed from the standpoints of both statutory authority and public policy,” O’Rielly said in a statement. "I support the Chairman's proposal to allow the Commission and Congress time to take another look at these ill-considered rules before they have a chance to throw broadband providers' data security practices into unsettled territory.” O’Rielly said he generally supports the process Pai is following in moving forward on a stay, while giving commissioners a chance to vote.

The U.S. should auction most broadband subsidies "to catch up with the rest of the world," said American Enterprise Institute scholar Mark Jamison, who was on Donald Trump's presidential transition team for the FCC. Peru and Chile pioneered telecom subsidy auctions and much of FCC Connect America Fund support is now auctioned for high-cost areas, but such auctions should be expanded to other USF programs, he said in a Friday blog post. "The old E-Rate, Rural Health Care, Lifeline and some CAF programs would be dropped. E-Rate, Rural Health Care and some CAF programs would be rolled into a CAF Phase II-like reverse auction. Lifeline support would move to income subsidies." Other federal government broadband programs should be terminated, with funding channeled "through the new world-class FCC system," he wrote. "As Commissioner Michael O’Rielly recently observed, federal broadband spending must have integrity and efficiency. The best bet for accomplishing this is a revamped FCC system." Asked how many countries auctioned broadband subsidies, Jamison told us he didn't know, but said "it is considered best practice internationally."

Four video relay service providers lobbied the FCC to issue a Further NPRM on VRS rates by the end of March, and draft an order by June 30, the end of the current rate year. CSDVRS (ZVRS), Purple Communications, ASL Service Holdings (GlobalVRS) and Convo Communications reviewed their Jan. 31 VRS rate proposal, said a joint filing posted Friday in docket 10-51 on a meeting with an aide to Chairman Ajit Pai. The FCC's 2013-2017 schedule of rate reductions was premised on planned "structural and competitive reforms," but many of those actions haven't been implemented "and the VRS market remains dominated by a single provider," said their Jan. 31 submission. "The current glide path has, in fact, benefited the dominant provider by forcing the non-dominant providers to reduce costs below optimum operating thresholds (i.e., near break-even or at an operating loss), while the dominant provider continues to compete from a position of comparative financial strength," they wrote. "The rate reduction that took effect on January 1, 2017, threatens the viability of all non-dominant providers, and will result in only further concentrating the VRS market." They proposed a four-tier rate structure to "move all providers toward a more reasonable operating margin" create "much needed rate stability" and save the telecom relay service fund $14 million over four years. Under the proposal, per-minute VRS compensation would be: $5.29 for an Emergent tier (500,000 monthly minutes and below), $4.82 for Tier 1 (up to 1 million minutes), $4.35 for Tier 2 (1,000,001 to 2.5 million minutes) and $2.83 for Tier 3 (above 2.5 million minutes). Sorenson Communications, the top VRS provider, didn't address the proposal but discussed various other topics in a filing on a meeting it and CaptionCall had with the same Pai aide.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order Friday requiring agencies to establish what the administration is calling regulatory reform task forces. “Each Regulatory Reform Task Force will evaluate existing regulations and identify candidates for repeal or modification,” the administration said in a news release. “Each agency’s Task Force will focus on eliminating costly and unnecessary regulations. To hold the Task Forces accountable, agencies will measure and report progress in achieving the President’s directives.” He surrounded himself by executives Friday when signing the order and lambasted what he called job-killing regulations. “An impossible situation, we’re going to solve it very quickly,” Trump promised at the order’s signing. He said the litmus test should be whether regulations make life better or safer for people. “We have begun a historic program to reduce the regulations that are crushing our economy,” Trump said Friday during the Conservative Political Action Conference. “We’re going to put the regulation industry out of work and out of business.” He repeated his belief that 75 percent of the “repetitive” and “horrible” regulations aren't needed, despite pledging his commitment to strong regulations otherwise. The order requires each task force to provide progress updates to agency chiefs within 90 days. “Within 60 days of the date of this order, the head of each agency, except the heads of agencies receiving waivers under section 5 of this order, shall designate an agency official as its Regulatory Reform Officer,” said the order text. Agency chiefs may request waivers from compliance with the order.

The FCC extended a March 1 filing deadline for submission of Form 477 data as of Dec. 31. The Wireline Bureau will announce the new deadline once technical difficulties in the filing interface are resolved, said a public notice Friday in docket 11-10. It said the interface Wednesday "experienced significant and unanticipated technical issues that have required the site to be inaccessible. The Bureau is working to resolve these technical difficulties as quickly as possible." The FCC's Electronic Document Management System also had problems Wednesday, which were apparently caused by a computer update, but they were resolved the same day (see 1702220072).

Approval of Ligado's LTE plans must include conditions protecting Iridium operations from interference, Iridium said in a series of meetings this week with all three FCC commissioners and staffers, said an ex parte filing Wednesday in docket 11-109. It recapped meetings with Iridium Vice President-Public Policy Maureen McLaughlin about Iridium's spectrum at 1617.775-1626.5 MHz, adjacent to 10 MHz of Ligado uplink spectrum. The company said it's still working with Ligado on technical fixes to interference concerns, but the agency should consider such conditions as reduced out-of-band emission (OOBE) from Ligado mobile terminals into Iridium bandwidth and exclusion zones around airport facilities where Ligado user terminal operation would be banned to protect aviation satellite communications. Iridium said Ligado's OOBE limit proposal is insufficient. Ligado Thursday said it "filed publicly a proposal that addresses Iridium’s concerns, and we hope to continue our discussions with Iridium on that proposal as soon as possible to find a mutually agreeable solution.”

Groups urged the FCC to reverse a Feb. 3 revocation decision and reinstate Lifeline broadband provider designations for nine companies (see 1702030070). Chairman Ajit Pai "took away the connections of 17,500 customers that one of these providers was already serving, and stalled imminent service from the other eight," said a Free Press release Thursday highlighting a letter to the FCC signed by it and 37 others, including the AFL-CIO, American Library Association, Asian Americans Advancing Justice, Center for Media Justice, Common Cause, Communications Workers of America, NAACP, National Hispanic Media Coalition, New America's Open Technology Institute, Public Knowledge, Benton Foundation, Greenlining Institute and United Church of Christ. Separately, Gigi Sohn, a former counselor to previous FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, said the new Republican majority also has in its "crosshairs" the E-rate program subsidizing school and library telecom service and connections. She cited the Feb. 3 revocation of a January staff E-rate report and Commissioner Mike O'Rielly's Feb. 9 criticism of self-construction efforts by E-rate applicants that overbuild existing networks (see 1702100060). "Much like the case of Lifeline, the majority is using procedural steps and administrative tools to weaken the E-Rate program," said Sohn, an Open Society Foundations Leadership in Government fellow, in a blog post Wednesday. An FCC spokesman said Thursday the agency had no comment beyond Pai's recent defense of the Lifeline decision (see 1702070062).

Large multichannel video programming distributors and small cable programmers remain apart on restricting some carriage contract conditions, in FCC docket 16-41 reply comments posted Thursday on the independent and diverse programming NPRM. The American Cable Association and indie programmers jointly attacked large programmer arguments that the market is working, saying the "modicum of diversity" that comes from bundled conglomerate networks "foreclos[es] access to others [and] disserves the public interest." They said determination of whether most-favored nation language is unconditional will be relatively easy from the text of the provision itself. Joining ACA were programmers MAVTV Motorsports Networks, Ride TV and sister networks One America News Network and AWE. Charter Communications and Mediacom together said given the vast array of content choices available to consumers, no regulation promoting carriage of a particular program channel or channel group is needed. NAB continued its defense of bundling (see 1701270006), replying that no one provided any empirical evidence of large programmers having market power that rivals that of MVPDs. Public Knowledge said the FCC has authority under sections 616 and 628 of the Communications Act to tackle carriage agreement terms that hurt competition and said there's ample evidence to back the prohibition of unconditional MFNs and unreasonable alternative distribution method (ADM) language. Saying there was widespread agreement that defining indie programmers as those not vertically integrated with an MVPD is too broad, RFD-TV backed a definition meaning unaffiliated with a broadcast network, movie studio or MVPD. Along with backing a prohibition on unconditional MFN and unreasonable ADM clauses in carriage agreements, RFD-TV said the FCC should tackle bundling practices and the high switching costs and early termination fees. Charter/Mediacom also supported the agency taking a narrow definition of indie programmer, pushing one that doesn't include programmers that command significant market power through their offerings of must-have programming. NAB urged that broadcasters not be excluded from the indie programmer definition. Calling itself "a potential entrant to the video distribution marketplace," T-Mobile said the FCC should ensure unconditional MFNs don't block emerging video competitors and that unreasonable ADMs don't block over-the-top competition.