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

21. Department of Commerce · Minor

Press the U.S. position at the International Telecommunication Union

Not started

688 21. Department of Commerce

“Defend U.S. interests in international bodies. Strong representation at the International Telecommunication Union should protect the interests of both private and government users of spectrum. … NTIA should work with the U.S. delegation to ensure maximum adoption of the U.S. position.”

What has happened

  1. Not started

    Corrected. The earlier note said no U.S. position at the International Telecommunication Union was pressed on the record; that overstates the negative. The machinery that produces the U.S. position for the ITU's World Radiocommunication Conference ran throughout the window and is fully documented in the Federal Register: the FCC's WRC-27 Advisory Committee (OIA Docket 24-30) met six times between March 2025 and September 2026, its four Informal Working Groups met on a published schedule, and on 2026-01-31 the Commission renewed its charter for a further two years "to advise the Commission and to make recommendations for proposals for International Telecommunication Union (ITU) World Radiocommunication Conferences", reporting "in advance of the deadline established by the ITU for submission of proposals by administrations to WRC-27". What the record does not show is the thing this Quote actually asks for. The Committee is the FCC's, established in 2024 and re-chartered unchanged; NTIA — the bureau the Quote addresses — appears nowhere in any of the seven notices, published nothing on the ITU or the WRC in the window, and there is no U.S. delegation to WRC-27 yet because the conference is in 2027. This is standing machinery predating the ask, continuing: §3b's moved-nearby case, not delivery.

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 — the international items are a UK memorandum of understanding, a 6G security “call to action”, a Ghana satellite-connectivity training and the Global Coalition on Telecommunications principles, none of them ITU; Federal Register full text since 2025-01-20 for "International Telecommunication Union" (18 documents, all FCC proceedings and a Coast Guard CRADA citing ITU allocations, plus State’s 2025-04-18 stakeholder-briefing notice) and for "World Radiocommunication Conference"; a jq pass over the 19 in-window NTIA records; and the state.gov sitemap grepped for itu, radiocommunication and telecommunication-union.

WRC-27 preparation is where this ask would show, and the U.S. preparatory process runs through the FCC’s WRC Advisory Committee and State’s delegation rather than through published NTIA documents. A read-queue row has been added.

Read-queue ticket 07, 2026-09-06. The row proposed the FCC’s WRC Advisory Committee docket as the thing that would settle this, and it does — from the Corpus, not from fcc.gov, which answers 403 to every rung of scripts/fetch-page.mjs on /wrc-27-advisory-committee and on /general/world-radiocommunication-conference-advisory-committee. The seven in-window notices are all in fr-notice.ndjson and read at govinfo:

jq -r 'select((.agencies//[]|join(";"))|test("Federal Communications"))
       | select(.title|test("Radiocommunication";"i")) | [.date,.title,.url]|@tsv' fr-notice.ndjson

A warning for whoever greps this file next: a jq filter of the shape select((.title+(.raw.abstract//""))|test(...)) silently returns nothing on these records, because many notices have no raw object at all and the whole expression errors out per line. Run jq without 2>/dev/null at least once, or the negative you record is a bug in your filter. That is very likely what produced the earlier pass’s claim that a full-text search for "World Radiocommunication Conference" found nothing.

Action
other
Object
U.S. representation at the International Telecommunication Union
ID
1917