House Republicans may be pushing back on President Joe Biden’s nominee for a third Democrat on the Federal Communications Commission, but they are pushing him to nominate an inspector general for the agency as it hands out billions of dollars in broadband subsidies.

That came in a letter to the president signed by Reps. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.), House Energy & Commerce Committee ranking member; Robert Latta (R-Ohio), House Subcommittee on Communications and Technology ranking member; and Bill Johnson (R-Ohio).

The RAY BAUM's Act of 2018 made the FCC IG a presidential appointee, which means the Senate must sign off on the pick. But since then, the lawmakers said, the presidentially appointed position has remained vacant. The current unappointed IG remains in place, but that has been for moe than a year and a half, the lawmakers said.

Also: GOP Slams FCC Over EBB Subsidy Abuse

They noted that the current IG — David Hunt — issued an advisory about fraud and abuse in broadband subsidy programs, but given the “unprecedented” funding involved they want a nomination to the post expedited.

Back in March, Hunt put out an advisory to users and providers of the FCC's Lifeline, Emergency Broadband Benefit and Affordable Connectivity Program subsidies of “improper and abusive enrollment practices that are part of some providers’ online enrollment processes.”

Republicans have long questioned the independence of the FCC IG. ■

President Trump has signaled his plan to name John Chase Johnson to serve as inspector general of the FCC. Current FCC inspector general David Hunt has served in that post since January 2011. 

The President signaled to Congress Wednesday (Jan. 8) that he would be submitting Chase's nomination, which must be confirmed by the Senate. 

Johnson is currently an attorney in the commercial litigation and government contracts groups of D.C. law firm Covington & Burling. 

Before joining the firm, Johnson was in the Marine Corps including deployment in Afghanistan, a point the White House made in announcing the nomination. 

Johnson remains a military judge and a major in the Marine Corps Reserves. 

An FCC spokesperson was not available to comment on the nomination.

The alleged cyberattack that briefly overwhelmed the FCC's Electronic Comment Filing System (ECFS) in early May 2017 was actually a deluge of public comments, spurred by HBO's John Oliver's call for viewers to send pro-net neutrality comments to the agency. The FCC's Office of Inspector General is completing an independent investigation of the incident, concluding that the agency's former chief information officer incorrectly told the commissioners on May 8 last year that the outage was caused by a high-volume attack by a small group of antagonists who tried to tie up the FCC server.  

Related: FCC Hit By DDoS Attacks (May 8, 2017)

FCC chairman Ajit Pai, announcing the findings on Monday, explained that "the Inspector General’s office asked my office not to discuss this investigation while it was ongoing so as not to jeopardize it."

Pai also turned the incident into a political moment, noting that the "FCC’s former chief information officer, who was hired by the prior administration and is no longer with the commission, provided inaccurate information about this incident to me, my office, Congress, and the American people."

"This is completely unacceptable," Pai added, emphasizing that he was "disappointed that some working under the former CIO apparently either disagreed with the information that he was presenting or had questions about it, yet didn’t feel comfortable communicating their concerns to me or my office."

During his May 7 Last Week Tonight show in which he discussed net neutrality, Oliver urged viewers to express their views on the topic to www.gofccyourself.com, which linked directly to the FCC's electronic comments site. More than a million comments poured in, causing the FCC's site to crash briefly, prompting claims that a handful of hackers had created a distributed denial of service (DDoS) barrier.

Related: John Oliver Takes on FCC's Pai, Net Neutrality (May 8, 2017)

"This report debunks the conspiracy theory that my office or I had any knowledge that the information provided by the former CIO was inaccurate and was allowing that inaccurate information to be disseminated for political purposes," Pai said.

Democratic Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel immediately augmented Pai's statement, saying “The Inspector General Report tells us what we knew all along: the FCC’s claim that it was the victim of a DDoS ... is bogus."

"What happened instead is obvious—millions of Americans overwhelmed our online system because they wanted to tell us how important internet openness is to them and how distressed they were to see the FCC roll back their rights," Rosenworcel said. "It’s unfortunate that this agency’s energy and resources needed to be spent debunking this implausible claim.”

In his statement, Pai criticized "a culture... we inherited from the prior Administration... in which many members of the Commission’s career IT staff were hesitant to express disagreement with the commission’s former CIO in front of FCC management."

Pai cited the still-unreleased report as documenting that on May 8, 2017, the former CIO "informed my office that ‘some external folks attempted to send high traffic in an attempt to tie-up the server from responding to others, which unfortunately makes it appear unavailable to everyone attempting to get through the queue.’ In response, the Commission’s Chief of Staff, who works in my office, asked if the then-CIO was confident that the incident wasn’t caused by a number of individuals ‘attempting to comment at the same time ... but rather some external folks deliberately trying to tie-up the server.’ In response to this direct inquiry, the former CIO told my office: ‘Yes, we’re 99.9% confident this was external folks deliberately trying to tie-up the server to prevent others from commenting and/or create a spectacle.' "

Pai also pointed to "a flawed comment system." He vowed that the "most important question is what can be done to prevent this from happening again" and cited the report's spotlighting the need for the FCC to revamp its comment filing system.

"It has become abundantly clear that ECFS needs to be updated," he said, noting that last week Congress approved a reprogramming request that allots funding to redesign ECFS. 

Public-interest group Free Press piled on Pai after the IG report and the commissioners' responses. Free Press deputy director and senior counsel Jessica J. González said in part in a statement: “Today’s IG report exposes the Pai FCC’s general willingness to ignore logic and contradictory evidence when doing so supports his preconceived notions and political agenda. In this case, the former chief information officer’s story was obviously flawed, but Pai and his office didn’t hesitate to pass along that story and dismiss its critics. In his response to the inspector general’s report, Pai throws former CIO David Bray under the bus and tries to blame the prior administration for hiring him. But Bray worked for Pai at the time of these incidents, and later statements describing the supposedly 'voluminous documentation' for this attack came from Pai’s hand-picked spokesman. 

"Pai has a long history of misleading the public on Net Neutrality, including claiming that there was strong public support for his 2017 decision to repeal the rules, which couldn’t be further from the truth. This makes it particularly difficult to take anything he or his staff says about the Net Neutrality docket, or frankly anything at all, at face value," González said.

The Republican leadership of the House Energy & Commerce Committee is challenging the independence of the FCC Inspector General's (IG) office following its finding that FCC chairman Tom Wheeler did not leak information about the existence of a compromise on Lifeline subsidy reforms in order to blow up the deal.

E&C Chairman Fred Upton (R-Mich.) and Communications Subcommittee Chairman Greg Walden (R-Ore.) want the FCC to supply some specific information about the "interdependence" of the FCC and IG, they said in a letter to IG David Hunt.

“In order to address our committee’s concerns regarding the independence of the FCC’s Office of Inspector General and the impact on accountability in the FCC’s decision-making and management, we request… information necessary to understand the practical and working relationship between the Office of the Chairman and the Inspector General.”

The IG report found that Wheeler did leak the information, but that he had the authority to make nonpublic information public, and that there was no evidence of a motive beyond what FCC spokesperson Shannon Gilson, who said she had recommended the chairman release the info, said was "providing the press with information about the compromise Lifeline proposal to address the confusion that was already surrounding the item in the media."

The IG's office said it "found no evidence that the information was provided to the press in an attempt to unduly influence the outcome of the vote."

The Letter from Upton and Walden addresses their concerns more generally, citing a number of issues including what they said was the possible sharing of IG drafts and audits with the chairman's office before they were finalized, the FCC Office of Human Resources, a  "direct report" to the chairman's office, participating in IG hiring decisions, the apparent absence of IG reports from the FCC Web site.

The Republican legislators said that there is "growing concern that because the FCC Inspector General is appointed by, reports to, and is under the general supervision of the chairman of the commission that the IG is not free to provide the honest and independent criticism that is critical to the performance of the IG's oversight."

They want to know, among other things, what mechanisms are in place to ensure IG independence, what role the chairman plays in budgeting, drafting releases, and copies of all communications between the FCC and IG's office since 2012.

Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John Thune (R-S.D.), who requested the IG investigation, was also not happy, particularly with the finding that the chairman was free to leak the information.

“The findings by the inspector general reveal significant dysfunction and a lack of transparency at the FCC,” he said after the committee circulated the report publicly. “Under the agency’s current interpretation, the FCC chairman is free to leak cherry-picked details about proceedings and deliberations while other commissioners are gagged and even kept in the dark about decisions by the chairman to approve such leaks. Worse yet, the FCC is not keeping a record of decisions by the chairman to disclose non-public information. This report is yet another indication of increased partisanship and dysfunction at the FCC that underscores the need for Congress to reform how the agency does business.”

Wheeler's office declined to comment on the Upton/Walden letter.