Ajit Pai\u00a0formally announced Monday that he will leave his position as chair of the Federal Communications Commission on Jan. 20.<\/p>\n
Stepping down from the FCC when a new president is inaugurated is an agency tradition.<\/p>\n
Pai, a Republican promoted to chairman by\u00a0President Trump, has had a tenure mired in controversy.<\/p>\n
His most notable decision, the repeal of Obama-era net neutrality rules that allowed the commission to go after service providers that discriminate against certain web traffic, is likely to be overturned shortly after Democrats have a 3-2 majority.<\/p>\n
Other decisions, like overseeing the merger of T-Mobile and Sprint, will be harder to reverse.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt has been the honor of a lifetime to serve at the Federal Communications Commission, including as Chairman of the FCC over the past four years,\u201d Pai said in a statement.<\/p>\n
He highlighted some of his other achievements in Monday\u2019s statement, including \u201cclosing the digital divide\u201d and designating 988 as the new number of the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.<\/p>\n
President-elect\u00a0Joe Biden\u00a0will now have the opportunity to either promote one of the two Democrats on the commission \u2014 Jessica Rosenworcel and Geoffrey Starks \u2014 or bring in a new chair from outside the FCC.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Ajit Pai\u00a0formally announced Monday that he...<\/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-29552","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\/29552","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=29552"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29552\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29554,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29552\/revisions\/29554"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=29552"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=29552"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=29552"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}