The bipartisan leaders of the House Energy and Commerce Committee urged the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on Monday to take action to ensure telecommunications providers could begin ripping out and replacing potentially suspect network equipment.<\/p>\n
The concerns come months after\u00a0President Trump<\/a>\u00a0signed into law<\/a>\u00a0the Secure and Trusted Communications Act, which bans U.S. companies from using federal funds to purchase equipment from Chinese telecom groups Huawei and ZTE, citing national security concerns.<\/p>\n The law, which was sponsored in the Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman\u00a0Frank Pallone<\/a>\u00a0Jr. (D-N.J.) and ranking member\u00a0Greg Walden<\/a>\u00a0(R-Ore.), among other sponsors from both parties, also established a $1 billion fund to help smaller telecom groups rip out and replace equipment that is deemed a threat. The fund is administered by the FCC.<\/p>\n Pallone and Walden\u00a0sent a letter<\/a>\u00a0to FCC Chairman\u00a0Ajit Pai<\/a>\u00a0on Monday emphasizing that while Congress had not yet fully funded this reimbursement program, the FCC should take a series of steps immediately to ensure the process of replacing potentially suspicious equipment could begin.<\/p>\n \u201cIt is a top bipartisan, bicameral priority of the United States Congress to ensure that our nation\u2019s communications networks are secure,\u201d Pallone and Walden wrote. \u201cThe United States cannot allow the critical networks upon which consumers rely to be subject to espionage and malicious disruption by hostile foreign actors.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The bipartisan leaders of the House...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29402","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-u-s-a"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29402","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=29402"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29402\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29403,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29402\/revisions\/29403"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=29402"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=29402"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=29402"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}