Dan Gilman Discusses FCC Quorum Rules and Commissioner Removal
Communications Daily quoted Daniel Gilman, ICLE Senior Scholar, in a piece examining how quorum requirements could complicate any White House effort to remove the FCC’s sole Democratic commissioner. Read the full piece here.
Dan Gilman, a senior scholar of competition at the International Center for Law & Economics, told us that the administration’s March 2025 firings of FTC Commissioners Rebecca Kelly Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya was seemingly not necessary. Republican Commissioner Mark Meador’s confirmation the month after the firings went through easily and could have been accelerated without controversy, giving the FTC a GOP majority anyway, he said.
What the White House really wanted by firing Slaughter and Bedoya was for SCOTUS to overturn its 1935 Humphrey’s Executor decision and give its blessing for dismissing commission members at will, argued Gilman, who previously worked for 16 years at the FTC Office of Policy Planning.
He said the GOP already has an FCC majority, so doing away with Gomez, the lone Democrat, doesn’t add much. “What do you win by not having any dissents?” he asked. Even with the FCC’s statutory quorum requirement, the agency “could do a fair bit of work” via delegated authority to bureaus, “but there would be limits.”
Despite the FCC’s statutory requirement to have a quorum of at least three commissioners, agency rules let the chair temporarily convene a board of commissioners to conduct essential business when a full quorum isn’t available, Gilman noted. That board can’t do everything an FCC with a quorum can do, such as act on petitions for reconsideration or make a final determination on a rulemaking proceeding. But, Gilman said, there’s an exception to that exception — the board can take such steps if it finds there’s a public interest served by not delaying until a quorum is available. It’s unclear if that has been tested legally, he added.
The FTC under acting Chairwoman Maureen Ohlhausen “got quite a bit done” when it had only one other commissioner and no quorum, Gilman said. The agency might have benefited from the fact that for a long time, there was general bipartisan agreement among its members on antitrust issues, he said.