The Trump transition team is raising money to pay for salaries and "experts" to provide policy advice and briefings.

President-elect Donald Trump will be the first President with no previous government experience on any level and has been meeting at Trump Tower in New York with a host of folks, from Bill Gates to Kanye West, seeking their input.

"In total, we have 4,100 appointed positions we must fill and only 33 days until inauguration to get it done." said Vice President-elect Mike Pence  and transition team leader in an e-mail solicitation sent out Saturday (Dec. 17).

To ensure that they have "the best and brightest from every corner" of the America he says they will "put first" and "make great again," he says: "Please make a contribution of $100, $65, $50, $35, $25 or $10 to help fund our TRUMP (sic) Transition Team."

Among the folks they will have to find are at least two seats on the FCC and a new chairman, though he may come from the ranks of current Republican  commissioners.

In staffing his FCC transition team, President-elect Donald Trump has tapped a pair of American Enterprise Institute (AEI) vets and free-market deregulators in Jeffrey Eisenach and Mark Jamison.

While it is tough to predict which Trump will set the tone for the FCC -- the merger-threatening populist who has said he opposes the AT&T-Time Warner deal and would unwind Comcast-NBCU or the regulation-threatening candidate who said he wants two regulations axed for each new one added -- the choice of the transition team leadership could be instructive.

Eisenach and Jamison are linked at the communications deregulatory hip by AEI, a free-market think tank. Eisenach is director of AEI's Center for Internet, Communications and Technology Policy, while Jamison is a visiting fellow there. Eisenach is executive editor of AEI's TechPolicyDaily.com, while Jamison is a writer for the site.

While Eisenach has gotten attention, as a key overall transition team member, for his deregulatory views, in issues including net neutrality, Jamison's appointment adds some new deregulatory punch. "Regulation is about disappointing people at a rate that they can endure," Jamison has written. He is clearly out to "disappoint" people less.

He is the director of the Public Utility Research Center (PURC) at the University of Florida and has written extensively on telecom issues.

Among the recent headlines of his posts on TechPolicyDaily are:

"Restoring Effective Leadership at the FCC" (he concluded that the FCC under chairman Tom Wheeler has been politicized, less than analytical and lackeding transparency); "Why Secretary Clinton's Broadband Policies Will Fail" (Jamison said broadband subsidies are inefficient) and even "Do We Need the FCC?"

His enigmatic answer to the latter: "No, but yes."

Jamison said in the post that most of the reasons for having an FCC have "gone away," in part because there are few telecom network monopolies, and ISPs are rarely among those few. That is quite different from the Wheeler FCC's emphasis on ISP gatekeepers to justify various regulatory approaches, including net neutrality and broadband privacy rules, both of which are likely to get a second look under a Republican chair.

Jamison also said Web content is a competitor to broadcasting --  and sufficiently so that it would seem to "eliminate any need for FCC oversight of broadcasters."

Broadcasters have been arguing for years that the FCC was wrong not to include Web content as a competitor when it looks at its media ownership rules.

Jamison conceded there might be need for rules for the airwaves during times of emergency, but said that does not require regulating the content providers themselves.

He srgued that the reasons the FCC still exists have more to do with inertia -- an aircraft carrier is tough to stop once it gets going -- and the fact that it benefits businesses and special interests, sounding a populist note that resonates with the Trump mantra.

"The recent work on net neutrality, business data services and set-top boxes are bestowing benefits to some segments of the industry at the expense of other segments," he said, "and at the expense of customers, who ultimately bear the brunt of regulatory rent-seeking. The FCC’s universal service subsidies have, for example, delivered profits to numerous telephone companies over the years. And the cottage industries formed in support of net neutrality, set-top box regulation and universal service policies employ a large number of people.

So, what is the "yes" in Jamison's answer to whether an FCC is needed? He said it "appears" to be "important to keep radio spectrum allocation independent of day-to-day political pressures." Traditionally, even deregulatory Republicans have conceded that some spectrum cop is needed on the beat.

While Jamison has plenty of criticisms of Wheeler, he is a fan of several former chairs, including Republican Michael Powell, currently head of NCTA: The Internet & Television Association, as well as two Democrats, Reed Hundt and Bill Kennard, both chairs under President Bill Clinton).

Jamison said Hundt provided lessons in how to build a staff free of political concerns. Kennard got props for giving the agency a larger purpose, with such initiatives as providing pro-competitive models for regulators in other countries and setting an example of independence as an agency. Powell got credit for "decreases in backlogs, improved communications and morale, and a stronger esprit de corps"; he "built deep commitment, ownership, personal worth and shared success within the staff."

"Strong leadership at the FCC is needed regardless of the new administration’s regulatory agenda," Jamison wrote. "If the FCC’s work remains largely unchanged, the rebuilding is needed to ensure that the agency is strong enough to provide substantive decision-making and to withstand future politically-oriented chairmen. If the administration follows the other extreme and moves to largely disband the agency, effecting the change will require strong leadership."

FCC chairman Tom Wheeler said he has not decided on his departure date.

That came in a press conference following an abbreviated FCC public meeting -- the business took about a minute -- following the dropping of virtually all the agenda items after Republicans asked him to stand down from "controversial" votes.

Related:Wheeler Pulls FCC Votes on BDS, Other Items

Wheeler would not say whether he would stay on, as a commissioner, past when a new chairman was named to make the commission 2-2 until a successor is confirmed for Democrat Jessica Rosenworcel if she is not reconfirmed in the lame-duck Congress and has to leave at the end of next month.

The press conference was longer than the monthly meeting, as Wheeler talked about the items that were not voted, including revamping business data services and expanding the hours and networks providing video-described programming to the blind and hearing impaired.

Wheeler had pulled those and other items because the Republican commissioners had asked him to, he said, pointing out they were still on circulation and could be voted, though the chance of that is slim. He added that he hoped the items would be "quickly addressed" under the next FCC leadership.

Wheeler said he would work on making the transition to a new FCC as smooth as possible, which Republcan congressional leaders had asked him to do, but that he has heard nothing so far from the Trump transition team.

He said it was "a shame" that hospitals and small businesses would not get the benefits of his BDS reforms, that it was "truly disappointing" that 1.4 million rural Americans would continue to be deprived of LTE, and "tragic" that 1.3 million blind and sight-impaired would not be getting expanded access to video programming because they had been dubbed "controversial."

Wheeler noted that the items had gotten that label because they were opposed by the largest incumbent firms in the sector. Cable ops and studios and ISPs were all opposed to one or the other of the four items pulled. Wheeler said that when "so-called controversy" is the result of choosing between the common good and the status quo preferred by incumbents, the public interest should win out.

Asked about a Trump Administration effort to roll back any of the things he has been able to vote to adopt, Wheeler said it would be a "real mistake" to keep fast and open networks away from the public, as would undoing his broadband privacy order, as would rolling back broadband access to schools and libraries and low-income residents, as would basically anything counter to the concept that the American economy runs better with "competition, competition, competition."

As to whether he would support legislators getting together on a new network-neutrality bill that would clarify FCC authority, Wheeler said: “I think it is always worthwhile when people try and work together. We tried to work together here on net neutrality. The difference became one of  whether you had empty net neutrality with the title but not the reality and the other is whether you had meaningful net neutrality, and I assume that is what the debate is going to continue to be. “

Wheeler did not say whether he would try to wrap up the FCC's review of zero-rating plans in the days left him.