Former FCC Commissioner O’Rielly Working on USF ‘Patch’

Supreme Court to rule later this year if USF's funding mechanism is unconstitutional.

Former FCC Commissioner O’Rielly Working on USF ‘Patch’
Photo of former FCC Commissioner Michael O'Rielly, from Flickr

WASHINGTON, Jan. 27, 2025 – Some people in Washington have a Plan B in case the Federal Communications Commission’s Universal Service Fund is ruled unlawful.

Former Republican FCC Commissioner Michael O’Rielly (2013-2020) said he is involved in an effort to keep the agency’s $8.1 billion Universal Service Fund operating in the event the Supreme Court rules later this year that the program's funding mechanism is unconstitutional. 

In a Jan. 23 interview with Bloomberg’s Matt Schettenhelm, O’Rielly said, “We're going to see how oral arguments go and what the Supreme Court does over this case. I'm working on an effort to help have a Congressional patch. So if the court goes in one direction, all things aren't thrown up in the air [and] we actually have some kind of universal service system, because it has many benefits to it, even if it's got its warts.”

A patch was necessary as a stopgap measure, he said, because broad USF reform was too complicated.

"It's not something you can just do in a short weekend," said O'Rielly, who is a Visiting Fellow at the Hudson Institute. Reviving the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) would not factor into the USF patch, either, he said.

O’Rielly did not give details on what his “Congressional patch” would entail, but his comments showed that policy experts were pre-emptively combatting the issue of the USF getting overturned. O’Rielly isn’t the first former FCC leader to chime in on the Supreme Court’s USF case, as last week several former FCC commissioners filed a brief in support of upholding the USF.

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