FCC's Build America Agenda: Powering Hard Tech and Infrastructure

The Build America Agenda

• 💡 Chairman Carr's Build America Agenda at the FCC focuses on restoring American leadership in wireless, boosting the space economy, cutting red tape, modernizing operations, and protecting the telecom workforce.
• 🚀 This agenda represents a regulatory rewiring, not just reform, aiming to align policy with the core insight of abundance and a "default to yes" approach for building and deployment.
• ✅ The initiative has already deleted over 1,100 rules, closed more than 2,000 dormant dockets, and reduced satellite application backlogs by half in less than 12 months.

Advancing Hard Tech and Physical Infrastructure

• ⚙️ The current era, driven by AI and space advancements, demands building physical things at physical scale, shifting focus from software optimization to tangible infrastructure.
• 🛰️ Hard tech includes orbital data centers, massive LEO constellations, counter-UAS defense, and 6G, all requiring robust physical infrastructure like towers, spectrum, fiber, and launch capacity.
• 🛠️ The FCC is streamlining pole attachment rules to remove bottlenecks preventing gigabit Internet service and addressing state and local regulations that hinder broadband deployment.

Spectrum and Satellite Modernization

• 📡 Significant efforts are underway to open up 20,000 MHz of spectrum for satellite broadband and commit to auctioning terrestrial spectrum, including 800 MHz by 2034 and 180 MHz of upper C band in 2027.
• 🛰️ The satellite modernization agenda is replacing antiquated licensing processes with an assembly-line approach to match the rapid increase in LEO satellite launches.
• 📈 By removing outdated regulatory constraints, the FCC has enabled 180% capacity gains for satellite broadband without launching new satellites or releasing more spectrum, and facilitated faster direct-to-cell service.

National Security and Innovation Opportunities

• 🔒 A secure tech stack is critical for a robust hard tech stack, leading the FCC to establish a council on national security, crack down on foreign-controlled testing labs, and implement new undersea cable rules.
• 🎯 The opportunity window is open for innovators, with increasing regulatory velocity, clearing application backlogs, and a visible spectrum pipeline expanding the design space for new technologies.
• 🌱 The next decade's returns will come from those who build real things in the real world, emphasizing physical abundance in areas like towers, satellites, fiber, manufacturing, energy, and housing.

The Builder Frame and Nonpartisan Approach

• 🏗️ The regulatory posture is shifting to a "builder frame", prioritizing deployment and addressing problems in real-time, moving away from requiring justification for innovation.
• 🤝 Many of these initiatives, such as more spectrum availability and clearing application backlogs, are nonpartisan issues focused on good government, engineering, and economics.
• 💡 The FCC's Build America agenda embodies a commitment to choosing abundance over scarcity, speed over stasis, and deployment over excessive deliberation, drawing inspiration from past national building endeavors like the highway system and the space race.