Providing Consideration of s. 352, DTV Delay Act

Floor Speech

PROVIDING FOR CONSIDERATION OF S. 352, DTV DELAY ACT -- (House of Representatives - February 04, 2009)

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Madam Speaker, I have been in the House for 8 years, and I have been a member of the Energy and Commerce Committee, although on leave of absence, for 6. But before I came here, for two decades I was in the electronics industry, was part of the annual consideration of over a million dollars of private funding to help move digital television. We did so not just to sell televisions or to improve people's pictures, but in fact because of the efficiency of spectrum and what it would do. I have been a supporter of digital transition.

Today, I am here as the ranking member of Government Reform, sounding an alarm that I hope will be heard by my colleagues. President Obama did only one thing before he became President. Only once did he violate his ``one President at a time'' statement, and that was in fact on asking for a delay in the digital transition. I believe he did so because in fact he was misled.

It is clear that there is doubt as to whether a gentleman named Gerard Salemme, who is in fact a highly compensated $300,000-plus a year individual with a company which is behind today--behind in their technology rollout for using this new spectrum--was on his transition team, although he is still the executive vice president of a company called Clearwire.

To me, it appears as though the process behind closed doors in the transition team that led to the decision to delay digital television was clearly tainted by someone who, as an opportunist, may have been trying to gain those extra 4 months to make their technology competitive with those that are already rolled out. That, to me, is the first of many tragedies. You have heard many others.

Additionally, having been in the consumer electronics industry for over 20 years, I'm well aware that the cost of these digital boxes are about $40. So even if you claim that you have 6 million people who haven't received them, you do $40 times 6 million and pretty soon you figure out that it's $200 million-some that we would have to authorize with this delay in order to fully fund getting people their boxes.

No money is attached to this bill. As a result, this will simply cause a delay, giving certain companies an opportunity perhaps to catch up in technology, advancing one company over another, something we said we wouldn't do when we set a hard deadline. More importantly, we are not solving the basic problem here. It only takes $240 million or less dollars to fix this problem where $18 billion worth of spectrum is being held ransom.

This is bad business. It's bad for American technologies that are emerging, it's bad for all the services that will be granted. I came from high tech. I know what we are doing is forcing us to stay in horse and buggy for months longer.

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