Welcome to the Tech Policy Podcast. I'm Evan Schwarger, your host. Joining me today is a very special guest, FCC Commissioner Mike O'Reilly. Mike, thank you so much for joining me. Evan, thanks so much for having me here today. Well, this is now a huge honor for the show, as we have had two FCC commissioners, and I really hope that you'll be able to get the chairman to come on the show soon.

Well, I'll put in a good word, but I wouldn't count on that to have any impact.

So good luck.

Well, it's been some busy past few weeks at the FCC.

We've got a lot to talk about.

But I want to start out with what Politico called intrigue last week that happened at the commission.

You guys were slated to vote on a proposal to expand universal service subsidies under the Lifeline program to broadband, and the meeting was supposed to take place at 10.30 I.m., I believe, and then it got delayed for a

couple hours, and then some interesting things happened. So just for our listeners, what happened

last week? Sure. And so you know, and be clear, we're still under sunshine rules for that

item. It has not been released as of yet, so make sure that

no advocacy occurs in your capacity. But I'm happy to describe what I think happened and match

that up against what others think happened. You know, truth be told, for over a year, I pushed

hard that the commission and tackling and addressing the possible

expansion of Lifeline would include a cap on its overall spending.

Now, in fairness, I started with the basic premise that I would have rather reformed all of

the Lifeline program rather than trying to combine that with the expansion into broadband.

So let's deal with fixing the program and then expand it.

My colleagues were of the mind that they would rather deal with the expansion part.

So I kind of had to move in some regards and I said, okay, well if we're going to do the two together,

we have to do so in a fiscally sound way.

And so I was pushing hard and had for a year pushed hard for a cap on the spending part.

What happened last week and what you saw and the listeners were able to read about is a scenario where my colleague, one of my colleagues, came to me and said, look, I know this is your biggest issue.

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