Anna Gomez Is Wrong About Defunding Public Broadcasting

By Randolph May 

Unsurprisingly, FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez was quick to condemn Congress's decision to defund "public" [read: government-funded] media. After the Senate acted, she issued a statement claiming the action "is a key step in a coordinated campaign to silence public media, and the latest attempt by this Administration to censor and control speech."

She calls the defunding a "one-sided attack on free speech." 

Commissioner Gomez's condemnation perhaps would be more worthy of consideration if she had given even a mere nod in the direction of acknowledging the pronounced left-leaning bias in public broadcasting's programming, especially that of NPR. You won't find any such acknowledgement in her statement, or I suspect in any of her other declamations.

It would take much more than a short blog post to catalogue all the instances evidencing NPR's leftist bias. But for a short primer, please see long-time (25+ years) NPR senior editor Uri Berliner's piece in the Free Press highlighting some key examples, such as NPR's steadfast refusal to cover the Hunter Biden laptop story and insistence that the Wuhan lab leak theory regarding COVID was nonsense. And, as Mr. Berliner says, NPR's reporting on the contentious issues of climate change, the war in Gaza, and gender identity treatments for adolescents "leaned on moralizing and emotional certitude more than rigorous factual analysis."

So, while Ms. Gomez talks about "silencing those who report the news accurately," absent some acknowledgement – even a teensy, weensy one – that there have been legitimate issues of bias in public broadcasting's programming that needed to be addressed, her entreaties ring hollow. And this is especially so because we're talking about taxpayer-funded broadcasters, not private media outlets.

Ms. Gomez characterizes the defunding of public broadcasting as a "one-sided attack on free speech" by the Trump administration. Putting aside whether her accusation regarding one-sidedness squares with reality, she should acknowledge this truth: There are important differences between "public" media and private media when it comes to how the government should respond to claims of political bias.

It is not an attack on free speech for Congress and the president to decide that taxpayers should not be required to fund speech claimed to be politically biased. On the other hand, there may be – as Commissioner Gomez has suggested many times – threats to free speech protected by the First Amendment if the government, whether the Trump administration or any other, threatens private media outlets with adverse consequences based on the content of their programming.

That is the ground on which Commissioner Gomez should stand.  

 

A Revisionist History of the BEAD Program Ignores Congressional Intent

Today's Policyband (subscription required) included a useful pointed critique of a July 9 Washington Monthly article suggesting a clandestine plot by Republican lawmakers to sabotage from within the $42.45 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program. But there is even more that can be said by way of rebuttal.

The extraneous, partisan policies layered on top of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) by the Biden NTIA were not the issue, authors Paul Glastris and Kainoa Lowman insist. Instead, they make the unsupported claim that "the complexity and delays of the BEAD program and the broader failure of Washington over many years to solve the digital divide is overwhelmingly the result of telecom monopolies whose economic and political power previous administrations unleashed."

Likening NTIA's Notice of Funding Opportunity to an "everything bagel," the piece nevertheless goes to great lengths to assure us that requirements not found in the IIJA – promoting policies relating to labor standards, climate threats, net neutrality, third-party (so-called "open") access, and so on – "were not major time sinks." The real impediment, they suggest, was "incumbents' goal of avoiding competition to their existing infrastructure." The truth, meanwhile, is that lawmakers appropriately took reasonable steps to prevent the use of federal subsidies to overbuild privately financed networks to prevent waste and encourage additional private investment.

In the IIJA, Congress, exercising its authority under Article I of the Constitution's Spending Clause, reached a relatively rare bipartisan compromise. That compromise sought to learn from the mistakes of the past – mistakes that the authors describe at length – and once and for all connect those remaining locations not yet served by privately constructed broadband Internet infrastructure.

According to USTA | The Broadband Association, providers have invested nearly $2.2 trillion in broadband infrastructure since 1996 – including $94.7 billion just in 2023. Largely because of that capital spending, the FCC reported in May that "110 million homes and small businesses (95 percent) have access to a terrestrial fixed service with speeds of 100 Mbps download and 20 Mbps upload (100/20) or greater."

What the authors willfully choose to ignore is that the stated goal of the IIJA was to subsidize the prohibitively high price tag to connect primarily rural locations still "unserved" – not to use taxpayer dollars to compete with these existing, privately funded networks, which of course would disincentivize future investment.

Accordingly, Congress in the IIJA defined "unserved" as without access to speeds of at least 25/3 Mbps and "underserved" as lacking access to speeds of at least 100/20 Mbps; designated the FCC's then-under-development National Broadband Map as the definitive source of location-specific service availability information; established a challenge process to verify that information; and enlisted state-level offices to determine how best to overcome the unique geographic, financial, and other factors encountered within their borders.

To be sure, in practice BEAD Program implementation has left much to be desired. To suggest, however, that measures agreed to by Congress to avoid the wasteful overbuilding of existing broadband infrastructure using taxpayer dollars somehow tell a "story … of how telecom monopolies are behind the failure of government to solve the digital divide" ignores both the substantial role played by Biden NTIA overreach and the well-documented – in the article itself, no less – mistakes of the past.

Instead of engaging with the IIJA's actual text and structure, the authors rely on a convenient – but wrong-headed – narrative to try to deflect accountability away from those truly responsible and onto those that have invested the trillions necessary to connect nearly every location in the U.S.

Governor Moore Should Emulate Virginia's Regulatory Reform Efforts

 Maryland Governor Wes Moore talks a good game (well, sometimes!) about making Maryland's government more efficient, effective, and accountable. But talking and doing are two different things. 

During the last decade, my Free State Foundation colleagues have often offered ideas, across Democrat and Republican administrations, for implementing meaningful regulatory reform measures in Maryland. While reducing wasteful spending in Maryland's budget is important, of course, cutting red tape and eliminating unnecessary regulations also serves leads to cost savings that enhances consumer welfare.

 

At an event yesterday, Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin announced that the state had surpassed his target of cutting regulatory requirements by 25%. To lead his regulatory reform efforts, Governor Youngkin quickly established a new Office of Regulatory Management (ORM), initially led by Andrew Wheeler and for the last couple of years directed by Reeve Bull, a well-known expert regarding regulation and administrative law.

 

In this piece, "Regulatory Reform in the Old Dominion," Susan Dudley, herself one of the nation's foremost scholars on regulation, chronicles what was achieved in Virginia by Governor Youngkin, Reeve Bull, and the regulatory reform team – and how they did it.

 

If you are interested in improving Maryland's economic climate and benefitting consumer welfare by eliminating red tape, it's worth reading Susan Dudley's piece and getting inspired by Governor Youngkin's effort. More to the point, I commend it to Governor Moore – hoping it might not be too late for him to gaze across the Potomac and get inspired too.

PRESS RELEASE: FSF's Randolph May Commends FCC for Employing Direct Final Rulemaking

 

 

Regarding the FCC’s July 3 announcement that it plans to employ the “Direct Final Rule” process to eliminate unnecessary rules, Free State Foundation President Randolph May issued the following statement:

“At different times over many years, I’ve encouraged the FCC to issue Direct Final Rules to expedite getting unnecessary and costly rules off its books. With direct final rulemaking, there is still an opportunity for the public to comment, but if no significant adverse comments are submitted within an abbreviated time frame, then the rules identified in the agency’s notice are eliminated without the need for any further bureaucratic rigmarole. The Direct Final Rule process, recognized and promoted by the Administrative Conference of the United States, is a perfect vehicle for advancing the aims of the DELETE DELETE DELETE proceeding, and I commend Chairman Carr for using it to achieve worthwhile deregulatory goals.”

PRESS RELEASE: The USF Fund May Be Constitutional, But It's on Shaky Ground

 

Free State Foundation President Randolph May issued the following statement regarding the Supreme Court’s decision in the FCC v. Consumers’ Research case:

“While the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the FCC’s universal service programs, I hope the challenge at least served to highlight the long-standing problems with the nearly $10 billion per year Universal Service Fund. Without meaningful substantial reform, the USF fund, as it exists now, is unsustainable. Consumers of traditional telephone services are now paying a tax of 36% on all their calls as the contribution base continues to shrink. Congress needs to get serious about engaging in a top-to-bottom examination of the program to determine its size and scope going forward, how it should be funded, or whether it should even exist."

 

FCC Deletes, Modernizes, Streamlines Cable Rate Regulation

At today's Commission open meeting, Chairman Brendan Carr's IN RE: DELETE, DELETE, DELETE initiative bore fruit when the agency adopted a Report and Order providing the cable industry with long-overdue relief on the rate regulation front. As long as Section 623 of the Communications Act remains on the books (see below for more on that), the rate a cable operator not facing "effective competition" – essentially a null set, legally speaking, since 2017 –charges for the Basic Service Tier (BST) remains subject to regulation. This item, (circulated version available here), however, "will remove from … regulations approximately 27 pages, 11,475 words, 77 rules or requirements, and 8 forms."

The Report and Order deregulates most cable equipment, exempts smaller systems, and declines to extend its rules to commercial establishments. It also modernizes and streamlines those rules that remain in place, primarily to reflect the sunset, over 25 years ago, of tier regulation beyond that of the BST – that is, the tier (1) upon which local broadcast television stations and public, educational, and government access (PEG) channels must be carried, and (2) to which rate regulation in theory still applies.

In practice, of course, given the ubiquitous presence nationwide of "effective competition" from direct broadcast satellite (DBS) operators, telco TV providers, and virtual multichannel video programming distributors (vMVPDs), rate regulation of the BST no longer occurs. As the item notes, the Commission itself is "unaware of any local communities that are actively regulating cable rates at this time."

In a June 5, 2025, post to the FSF Blog, Free State Foundation President Randolph May described this undertaking broadly as "a meaningful regulatory reform accomplishment" and referenced the following language from our comments: "what primarily stands in the way of unbridled, consumer-benefitting competition are ill-fitting rules that hamstring the subset of participants to which they uniquely apply." The Report and Order, the goal of which is to "unleash prosperity through deregulation," is significant step in the right direction.

Speaking of deregulation, according to Law360 (subscription required), earlier this week House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Brett Guthrie (R-KY) stated that "'it's time to have a real conversation and update the 1992 Cable Act.'" Consistent with the position for which I (as well as others associated with the Free State Foundation) long have advocated, most recently in "Deregulation Is the Cure for the Video Regulatory Disparity," a June 9 post to the FSF Blog, Chairman Guthrie indicated that he opposes calls to extend legacy MVPD regulation to virtual alternatives: "'I fear that imposing additional regulation on this industry rather than relieving burdens on others would slow down innovation rather than encourage it.'"

Nielsen: Streaming Surpassed Cable and Broadcast Combined in May

Nielsen's The Gauge™ provides a monthly snapshot of consumer viewing behavior. More to the point, it documents the trend over time away from traditional sources – "cable" and broadcasting – toward streaming options. Over the last four years, I have highlighted a few noteworthy milestones on that path:

• In "Nielsen: Viewership of Streaming Video Has Surpassed That of Broadcast Television," a June 2021 post to the FSF Blog, I noted that, in May 2021, consumers for the first time spent more time watching streaming services (26 percent) than broadcast television (25 percent).

• In September 2022's "A Tale of Two Trends: Traditional Video Distributors Shrink While Streaming Video Grows," a Perspectives from FSF Scholars, I pointed out that, as cable subscriber losses approached 1 million (949,209) during the second quarter of 2022, streaming for the first time exceeded one-third of total viewing.

• In an October 2022 post to the Free State Foundation blog, I reported that, in September 2022, for the first time streaming (36.9 percent) surpassed cable (33.8 percent).

The zero-sum ascendence of streaming continues: according to the most recent edition of The Gauge, in May 2025 streaming (44.8 percent) for the first time exceeded cable and broadcast television combined (44.2 percent):

In a Perspectives published earlier this month, I wrote that "[f]ar from raising competitive concerns, the Charter-Cox merger appears to represent a pragmatic effort to accelerate the modernization of legacy cable offerings to a world where video competition is both fierce and consumer-driven." This latest data point from The Gauge serves to underscore that conclusion.