Senator Ted Cruz opened the Senate Commerce Committee hearing America Offline? How Spectrum Auction Delays Give China the Edge and Cost Us Jobs with an invection against spectrum stasis, lapsed Federal Communication Commission (FCC) auction authority for two years, no auction in three years, and an empty spectrum pipeline following America’s highest earning auction of $91 billion in 2020. He rebuked former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley and Pentagon bureaucrats for insisting on “absolute control of their vast spectrum holdings” and impugned its efficiency. “No institution should be afforded blind deference—especially not one that can’t even pass an audit and claimed that leaving billions in tanks, helicopters, and weapons in Afghanistan was more efficient than bringing them home,” Cruz declared. “If DoD cannot operate alongside wireless carriers using these bands domestically, how can we expect it to prevail in a Pacific conflict?” Cruz asked in a nod to the coexistence of 5G and allied military operations in Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea.
Citing offsets for the Senate reconciliation process, Cruz observed that auctions could raise $100 billion or more for rebuilding our military, funding border security, and financing Coast Guard polar icebreakers. He noted the adversarial competitors Huawei, Salt Typhoon, and DeepSeek, which leverage mobile networks built on large tracts of mid-band spectrum in China for incubation and global export.
The US uses “spectrum overlays” to transition from old to new technology
Witness and Economist Tom Hazlett, author of The Political Spectrum The Tumultuous Liberation of Wireless Technology, from Herbert Hoover to the Smartphone, testified to federal spectrum waste and inefficiency:
Spectrum bands have been reserved for maritime communications in Utah. The Forestry Service has enjoyed exclusive frequency rights in New York City. And today, some 35 channels from the TV Allocation Table of 1952 are still reserved for terrestrial, over-the-air broadcasting. I Love Lucy might have benefited from this arrangement back in the day, but we now have more efficient means.
Hazlett described the spectrum “overlay” approach developed to allow 2G networks the rights to utilize vacant frequencies in the micro-wave band under “flexible use” rules. “Investors in 2G networks were able to pay incumbents to move aside – using alternative technologies or other frequencies – so as to free up bandwidth for higher valued services,” he explained. Hazlett also demonstrated how it allowed 5G to emerge on former satellite broadcast spectrum in the c-band and how it could facilitate coexistence for 5G in the lower 3 GHz where the military operates today.
Smart management of technology
The hearing explored pushback from defense actors claiming that moving or upgrading military systems would take decades and cost tens of billions or dollars, a position which Senator Blackburn spurned as “spectrum squatting.” Witnesses rejected the view that the Pentagon uses spectrum efficiently, noting that different agency constituencies could give different answers. Senators called for an inventory and classified briefing for better insight.
In any event, spectrum revenues could compensate defense incumbents for their relocation and upgrade. Moreover, the military can commandeer any U.S. frequency in emergencies and wartime, not to mention any communication network. Rather, the challenge is human-computer integration in the backend. Dr. Charles Bayliss of the Department of Defense Innovation Center testified to managing such complexity, detailing how cognitive tools of Bloom’s Taxonomy are used to train military actors in new systems adoption.
Spectrum stasis threatens US military superiority
Witness Matthew Pearl, formerly of the FCC and the National Security Council and now with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, testified that U.S. leadership in the app economy with Uber, WhatsApp, and Airbnb was facilitated in part by early-mover policy, citing the world’s first auction the 700 MHz band in 2008 for 4G/LTE networks. “U.S. innovators were the first to experiment and develop mobile apps, enabling U.S. companies to lead the world in the app economy, and unlocking hundreds of billions of dollars in economic benefits,” he noted. Pearl urged Congress and the administration not to miss the same window of opportunity by failing to auction spectrum for 5G/6G, warning that this failure would harm the military because it too will be deprived of needed mobile wireless innovation. Pearl further predicted that within two years, consumers will experience degradation in their mobile wireless experience if Congress does not make the needed spectrum available.
House Representative Rick Allen, following the lead of Senators Thune, Cruz, and Blackburn, has teed up restoring auction authority coupled with the needed frequencies for licensed and unlicensed use and upgrade of federal systems in the Spectrum Pipeline Act of 2025.
