When the Federal Communications Commission convenes over important items—like, say, an impending net neutrality vote—nobody except the commissioners knows, ahead of time, exactly what they’ll be deliberating. The public gets broad-brush descriptions, but written meeting items and proposed rules are circulated only to commissioners, and released to the public after the vote is over.
Accordingly, while the FCC announced weeks ago that they would vote on net neutrality in February, they have only given hints of what they will actually be voting on.
Republican FCC commissioner Michael O’Rielly has penned a stinging blog post accusing other FCC members of withholding such information on their meetings for disingenuous or insufficient reasons. O’Rielly argues that there are no sustainable reasons not to make proposed rules available to the public before votes.
“[T]he inability of the public to obtain a complete picture of what is in a pending notice of proposed rulemaking or order routinely leads to confusion over what exactly is at stake,” O’Rielly says.
O’Rielly makes the case for transparency from a practical perspective—since information is so obscured and delayed, misunderstandings of FCC policy abound, and this can result in staffers needlessly “sifting through red herrings” and wasting their time on irrelevant complaints.
He argues that the FCC’s ostensible reasons for keeping the documents private do not stand up to scrutiny. Among other things, he suggests that they are reluctant to put in the extra work that greater transparency would require: “The concern is that, if we provide a copy of the draft item, we will get more specific comments and ex partes that staff will have to address when finalizing the item. That is, we might actually get constructive feedback based on facts about what is in a draft that require us to roll up our sleeves and explain why we’ve made certain decisions and discarded alternatives.”
“Our capable and hardworking staff and managers are up to the task, yet I’m told that it somehow would be unworkable,” he writes.
Another worry, according to O’Rielly, is that disclosing some of their documents will make it more difficult to justify withholding other private internal documents from Freedom of Information Act requests. This would be difficult, but not impossible, he counters: “I am confident that our talented lawyers at the agency can handle it.”
He also charges that there are “unspoken objections” to publicizing documents: “I gather that there is unease about making the process more transparent because parties could be in a better position to figure out which edits have been requested by which offices.”
This is O’Rielly’s second blog post urging change. In August, he argued that “As with any written document, the more reviews a regulatory item receives before going out the door, the better.”
(h/t The Hill)
