Dozens of Groups Urge Top Trump Officials to Oppose NextNav Plan
Opponents said an upcoming FCC proposal on GPS ‘may incorporate elements of’ the company’s plan
WASHINGTON, Oct. 2, 2026 – More than 100 companies and trade associations asked senior Trump administration officials to weigh in against a navigation company’s spectrum plan.
In Thursday letters to Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett, the companies said they feared a forthcoming Federal Communications Commission proposal on GPs backups “may incorporate elements of NextNav's proposal.”
NextNav is asking the FCC to reorganize the 902-928 MegaHertz (MHz) band, where it currently has operations, to allow the company to deploy a terrestrial GPS backup and a potentially lucrative 5G broadband network.
Fellow users of the band have almost uniformly opposed the plan, fearing interference from higher power gear would render their IoT and monitoring devices unusable.
The letter to Hassett was signed by 80 companies and trade groups, including Walmart, Boeing, and Duke Energy, and the letter to Duffy was signed by 62 groups including major American airlines and tolling operators. Some entities signed both.
Both letters asked the recipient to oppose the plan at the FCC, forecasting billions in necessary replacements of RFID chips and transponders.
“The record is clear, reconfiguring the existing Lower 900 MHz Band is neither necessary to achieve our national PNT goals nor is it without serious economic consequences for American consumers and the businesses they rely on,” companies wrote to Hassett.
Renee Gregory, NextNav’s government affairs chief, said in a statement that the company “committed to working with stakeholders, the Commission, and this Administration” to advance its plan.
“These letters only underscore why this issue belongs before the FCC’s expert engineers, where claims about coexistence, interference, and PNT resilience can be evaluated through a fact-based technical process,”she said.
The FCC took comment last year on NextNav’s proposal and other GPS backups generally. A filing with the White House’s Office of Management and budget has stakeholders thinking the agency is preparing to seek comment on a GPS proposal of some kind.
Lawmakers on the House Appropriations Committee cleared an FCC budget bill earlier this year that would block any work on NextNav’s plan. The bill hasn’t moved since then.
Some House Commerce Committee members were also weary of the company’s proposal, but Rep. Brett Guthrie, R-Ky., the head of the committee, repeatedly said during a hearing this summer he was upset that appropriators tried to act unilaterally on the issue.
Coexistence tests
NextNav has FCC clearance to conduct multiple tests of its proposed system to gauge interference in real-world settings.
Last week the Security Industry Association, a NextNav opponent, told the FCC that the company’s test radios in San Jose, Calif., were operating at lower power than a 5G network normally would. That would give the appearance of less interference than a mobile deployment in the band would really generate, the group said.
In a Monday filing, NextNav responded that it was operating its gear at the maximum power approved under its experimental license from the FCC and in line with normal 5G use.
A new lobbying group spun up to oppose the company’s plan, including SIA and many signatories of the Thursday letters, also sent representatives last week to meet with staff from all three FCC commissioners’ offices on the issue.
