Senate confirms FCC nominees

The Senate returned the Federal Communications Commission to full strength Wednesday night, confirming a bipartisan pair of nominees to full five-year terms.

Brendan Carr, a sitting Republican commissioner, was reconfirmed to a new term and Democratic nominee Geoffrey Starks was confirmed after a months-long delay in a voice vote Wednesday night, on the last day of the session.

Their confirmations had been delayed after Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) had placed a hold on Carr’s nomination, which had been paired with Starks, over a dispute about the agency’s rural health care efforts. Sullivan agreed to release the hold last month after talks with FCC Chairman Ajit Pai.

“The agreement to pair and confirm these nominees finally gives us a full FCC to decide important questions about spectrum management, the deployment of broadband to underserved communities, and building next-generation wireless networks,” Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), the chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, said in a statement. “I congratulate Geoffrey Starks and Brendan Carr on this Senate action allowing them to turn their attention toward work benefiting the public.”

Starks was nominated by President Trump in June of last year. He had been serving as the assistant bureau chief of the FCC’s Enforcement Bureau after leaving the Justice Department in 2015, where he was a senior counsel to Deputy Attorney General Jim Cole.

Carr, who was confirmed to a partial term in 2017, had previously been a legal adviser to Pai before briefly serving as the FCC’s general counsel.