Spectrum Pipeline Act of 2025
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Rep. Allen, Rick W. [R-GA-12]
ID: A000372
Bill's Journey to Becoming a Law
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3. Floor Action: If approved by committee, the bill goes to the full chamber for debate and voting.
4. Other Chamber: If passed, the bill moves to the other chamber (House or Senate) for the same process.
5. Conference: If both chambers pass different versions, a conference committee reconciles the differences.
6. Presidential Action: The President can sign the bill into law, veto it, or take no action.
7. Became Law: If signed (or if Congress overrides a veto), the bill becomes law!
Bill Summary
Another bill, another opportunity for our esteemed lawmakers to demonstrate their boundless ignorance and craven self-interest.
**Main Purpose & Objectives:** The Spectrum Pipeline Act of 2025 is a masterclass in Orwellian doublespeak. Ostensibly, its purpose is to "require the Federal Communications Commission to auction spectrum" between 1.3 gigahertz and 13.2 gigahertz. In reality, this bill is a Trojan horse for corporate interests, designed to further enrich the already bloated coffers of telecom giants.
**Key Provisions & Changes to Existing Law:** The bill's primary objective is to reallocate spectrum from federal use to commercial use, with a focus on "full-power commercial licensed use cases." This means that our benevolent lawmakers are essentially handing over valuable public resources to private companies, who will then use them to further their own interests. The bill also establishes a schedule for the Assistant Secretary of Commerce and the FCC to identify and auction off this spectrum.
**Affected Parties & Stakeholders:** The usual suspects benefit from this bill:
1. Telecom corporations: They'll get access to valuable spectrum, which they can use to expand their services and increase profits. 2. Lobbyists: The real puppet masters behind this bill will continue to reap the rewards of their influence peddling. 3. Politicians: Our lawmakers will receive generous campaign contributions from the telecom industry, ensuring their re-election and continued fealty to corporate interests.
**Potential Impact & Implications:** This bill is a symptom of a larger disease: the corrupting influence of money in politics. By auctioning off public resources to private companies, our government is perpetuating a system that prioritizes profits over people. The consequences will be:
1. Increased costs for consumers: As telecom corporations expand their services, they'll inevitably pass on the costs to customers. 2. Reduced competition: Smaller players in the market will struggle to compete with the behemoths who've secured valuable spectrum. 3. Further erosion of public trust: This bill is just another example of our government's willingness to sacrifice the public interest for corporate gain.
In conclusion, the Spectrum Pipeline Act of 2025 is a textbook case of regulatory capture, where special interests have hijacked the legislative process to serve their own agendas. It's a stark reminder that, in Washington D.C., the only thing more abundant than self-serving politicians is the stench of corruption.
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Project 2025 Policy Matches
This bill shows semantic similarity to the following sections of the Project 2025 policy document. Higher similarity scores indicate stronger thematic connections.
Introduction
— 847 — Federal Communications Commission The FCC has facilitated the transition from 3G to 4G and now 5G offerings in two ways. First, it has freed spectrum—the airwaves needed to deliver wireless ser- vices. Second, it has preempted state and local siting and permitting laws that could otherwise slow down the buildout of next-generation infrastructure. One of the FCC’s great success stories from 2017 to 2020 was securing U.S. leadership in 5G. The FCC also administers an approximately roughly $9 billion-a-year program called the Universal Service Fund (USF), which has been funded by a line-item charge that traditional telephone companies add to consumers’ monthly bills. Expenditures from this fund subsidize rural broadband networks and low-income programs as well as connections for schools, libraries, and rural health care facil- ities. Through various COVID-era laws, Congress has also provided the FCC with a one-time $24 billion appropriation for various low-income initiatives. POLICY PRIORITIES The FCC needs to change course and bring new urgency to achieving four main goals: l Reining in Big Tech, l Promoting national security, l Unleashing economic prosperity, and l Ensuring FCC accountability and good governance.15 Reining in Big Tech. The FCC has an important role to play in addressing the threats to individual liberty posed by corporations that are abusing dominant positions in the market. Nowhere is that clearer than when it comes to Big Tech and its attempts to drive diverse political viewpoints from the digital town square. Today, a handful of corporations can shape everything from the information we consume to the places we shop. These corporate behemoths are not merely exercising market power; they are abusing dominant positions. They are not simply prevailing in the free market; they are taking advantage of a landscape that has been skewed—in many cases by the government—to favor their business models over those of their competitors. It is hard to imagine another industry in which a greater gap exists between power and accountability. That is why a new Adminis- tration should support FCC action on several fronts. Specifically, the FFC should: l Eliminate immunities that courts added to Section 230. The FCC should issue an order that interprets Section 230 in a way that eliminates the expansive, non-textual immunities that courts have read into the statute. — 848 — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise As one of the FCC’s previous General Counsels noted, the FCC has authority to take this action because Section 230 is codified in the Communications Act.16 The FCC’s Section 230 reforms should track the positions outlined in a July 2020 Petition for Rulemaking filed at the FCC near the end of the Trump Administration.17 Any new presidential Administration should consider filing a similar or new petition. As Justice Clarence Thomas has made clear, courts have construed Section 230 broadly to confer on some of the world’s largest companies a sweeping immunity that is found nowhere in the text of the statute.18 They have done so in a way that nullifies the limits Congress placed on the types of actions that Internet companies can take while continuing to benefit from Section 230. One way to start correcting this error is for the FCC to remind courts how the various portions of Section 230 operate. At the outset, the FCC can clarify that Section 230(c)(1) does not apply broadly to every decision that a platform makes. Rather, its protections apply only when a platform does not remove information provided by someone else. In contrast, the FCC should clarify that the more limited Section 230(c)(2) protections apply to any covered platform’s decision to restrict access to material provided by someone else. Combined, these actions will appropriately limit the number of cases in which a platform can censor with the benefit of Section 230’s protections. Such clarifications might also include drawing out the traditional legal distinction between distributor and publisher liability; Section 230 did not do away with the former, nor does it collapse into the latter. l Impose transparency rules on Big Tech. Today, Big Tech offers a black box. After Google manipulates search results, a small business can see its web traffic drop precipitously overnight for no apparent reason, potentially flipping its outlook from black to red. On Facebook, social media posts are left up or taken down, accounts suspended or permanently banned, without any apparent consistency. Out of the blue, YouTube can demonetize individuals who have risked their capital and invested their labor to build online businesses. At present, the FCC requires broadband providers to comply with a transparency rule that can provide a good baseline for Big Tech. Under the FCC’s rule, broadband providers must provide detailed disclosures about practices that would shape Internet traffic—from blocking to prioritizing or discriminating against content. The FCC could take a similar approach to
Introduction
— 853 — Federal Communications Commission are doing this is by giving Beijing access to their high-powered cloud computing services. Therefore, it is time for an Administration to put in place a comprehensive plan that aims to stop U.S. entities from directly or indirectly contributing to China’s malign AI goals. Unleashing Economic Prosperity. The FCC needs to advance a pro-growth agenda that gives every American a fair shot at next-generation connectivity. This is vital for economic opportunity and prosperous communities. The current Administration has appropriated a lot of money for broadband infrastructure proj- ects, but it has failed to pair that spending with reforms that free more airwaves for wireless connectivity or streamline the permitting processes for broadband builds. That failure is holding back America’s hardworking telecommunications crews and leaving Americans stuck waiting on the wrong side of the digital divide. It is time for a return to the successful spectrum and infrastructure policies that prevailed during the Trump Administration—policies that enabled the U.S. to lead the world in 5G. l Refill America’s spectrum pipeline. From 2017 through 2020, the FCC took unprecedented steps to free the airwaves needed to power 5G and other next-generation wireless services. This work not only helped to secure America’s wireless leadership and bolster competition, but also enabled the private sector to create jobs and grow the economy. Recently, the FCC has failed to match the pace and cadence of those spectrum actions. Therefore, the FCC and a new Administration should work together to develop a national spectrum strategy that both identifies the specific airwaves that the FCC can free for commercial wireless services and sets an aggressive timeline for agency action. l Facilitate coordination on spectrum issues. Wireless services now play a central role in advancing America’s economic and national security interests. Over the past few years, this dynamic has led to an increasing number of headline-level disputes between the commercial wireless sector and federal agencies. These disputes are often framed in zero-sum terms as commercial wireless and federal agency stakeholders argue over the appropriate types and amount of airwaves that the government should allocate for various purposes. On the one hand, America’s global economic leadership depends on its ability to free spectrum that will power the U.S. commercial wireless industry. On the other hand, we must ensure that America’s national security and other federal agencies have access to the spectrum resources that they need to carry out their vital missions. — 854 — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise It is clear that the current process is not delivering optimal outcomes. In December 2021 and January 2022, for instance, the lack of interagency coordination and communication about mid-band 5G spectrum allocation between the FCC and the Federal Aviation Authority led to significant challenges for the U.S. aviation industry. Over the past two years, the FCC has failed to move spectrum into the commercial marketplace at the same pace and cadence that it did in the recent past. Creating better mechanisms to improve communication and cooperation between different federal agencies could enable a more effective and coordinated U.S. government telecommunications strategy. The White House should work with Congress to establish a spectrum coordination process that will work for both commercial and federal users. l Modernize infrastructure rules. By 2016, the construction of new cell sites—the building blocks for 5G—had essentially flatlined in America. Because of outdated permitting rules, it cost too much and took too long to build wireless infrastructure, so the FCC went to work. The agency updated the environmental and historic preservation rules that needlessly drove up the cost and slowed down the timeline for adding small cells. The FCC put in place guardrails to address outlier fees and delays imposed at the state and local levels on those same small-cell projects. It modernized the permitting process in several additional ways as well. Those FCC reforms delivered results. They allowed America’s private sector to bring thousands of families across the digital divide and to keep Americans connected during the pandemic. In fact, infrastructure builds accelerated at a record pace after those reforms. In 2019, for instance, U.S. providers built over 46,000 new cell sites—a sixty-fivefold increase over 2016 levels. The FCC has not engaged in any similar infrastructure reforms in recent years, and there is much more that needs to be done. For instance, the FCC’s prior reforms focused on streamlining the rules for small wireless facilities. The FCC should now explore similar action for the deployment of other wired infrastructure by imposing limits on the fees that local and state governments can charge for reviewing those wireline applications and time restrictions on the government’s decision-making process. The next Administration should also work to address the delays that continue to persist when it comes to building Internet infrastructure on federal lands. This is an area where the FCC itself has very little jurisdiction,
About These Correlations
Policy matches are calculated using semantic similarity between bill summaries and Project 2025 policy text. A score of 60% or higher indicates meaningful thematic overlap. This does not imply direct causation or intent, but highlights areas where legislation aligns with Project 2025 policy objectives.