Project 2025 Tracker / What’s done, what’s next

21. Department of Commerce · Notable

Begin temporary leasing of federal spectrum

Not started

687 21. Department of Commerce

“Expand utilization of federal spectrum. Begin short term, temporary leasing of government allocated spectrum to ensure optimum utilization while preserving federal agency use rights.”

What has happened

  1. Not started

    Nothing found. No short-term or temporary leasing of government-allocated spectrum has begun, and NTIA has proposed none. The administration's spectrum program is reallocation and auction rather than leasing: NTIA identified the 1675-1680 MHz band for the FCC (2026), cleared study plans for the 2.7 GHz and 4.4 GHz bands, launched spectrum.gov, and stood up a Space Launch Frequency Coordination Portal so commercial launch providers can request federal spectrum for individual operations — coordination of federal use, not a lease.

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

Negative search: the NTIA sitemap’s 111 in-window URLs read in full — every spectrum item is pipeline, sharing, study or coordination work; Federal Register full text since 2025-01-20 for "spectrum" leasing Federal (84 documents, all FCC secondary-market and satellite proceedings, none about federal spectrum); a jq pass over the 19 in-window NTIA Federal Register records; a grep of the enacted text of P.L. 119-21 for spectrum (the reconciliation act’s spectrum title restores FCC auction authority and sets a federal-band identification pipeline — an auction mechanism, not a leasing one); and presidential-actions.ndjson for spectrum, which returns EO 14369’s sec. 3(f) direction to the Secretary of Commerce to “assert spectrum leadership … including considering opportunities for reapportioning and sharing spectrum” — reapportioning and sharing, not leasing.

The Space Launch Frequency Coordination Portal notice is attached as the closest thing in the record: it lets commercial operators request federal spectrum for a launch and lets agencies approve it, which is temporary access to government-allocated spectrum by coordination rather than by lease.

Action
create
Object
leasing of government-allocated spectrum
ID
1915