FCC chairman Ajit Pai Thursday continued his string of FCC process reforms, now numbering a half dozen or so.
His fellow Republican commissioner Michael O'Rielly has long protested the fact that substantive changes were allowed to be made to items after the commissioners had voted them at public meetings.
Regular meeting watchers had become used to then-chairman Tom Wheeler ending a meeting with the granting of editorial privileges and a note of the standing objection.
Those privileges mean that bureau and commissioner staffs can make changes to the document.
O'Rielly said the power was too broad, extending beyond a footnote addition or grammatical changes to substantive edits. Pai agrees.
"Filling in a citation in a document is one thing; changing the meaning of that document is another," he said in announcing the change.
He said beginning with the Feb. 23 meeting, any substantive changes to a document have to be proposed by a commissioner and "should only be made in cases in which they are required, pursuant to the Administrative Procedure Act, as a response to new arguments made in a Commissioner’s dissenting statement."
O'Rielly's standing objection appears to be a thing of the past.
"I gladly support the effort to officially establish an FCC post-adoption editorial process that is sufficiently narrow and should rarely be needed," he said. "Finally fixing a process abuse of our past. Chairman Pai should be commended for his continued leadership on process reform."
