President-elect Joe Biden continued to add members to his transition team, this time selecting a handful of individuals to oversee the Federal Communications Commission, including a former commissioner who voted in favor of the 2015 Omnibus ruling that dramatically overhauled the Telephone Consumer Protection Act and led to a landmark lawsuit.
Mignon Clyburn, who served as a commissioner of the FCC between 2009 and 2018 was one of four individuals named to the agency’s oversight team, joining John Williams, Smitty Smith, and Paul de Sa. Williams is a senior counselor for the House Judiciary Committee, Smith was a former legal advisor to the chairman of the FCC who unsuccessfully ran for Attorney General of Washington, D.C., in 2014, and de Sa served two stints at the FCC between 2009 and 2012 and 2016-2017 as chief of staff of for the agency’s Office of Strategic Planning.
Clyburn was one of three Democrats at the FCC who, in July 2015, voted to approve a Declaratory Ruling that amended the TCPA, introducing a host of changes that included expanding the scope of what defines an automated telephone dialing system and broadened the means in which consumers could revoke consent to be contacted. That lead ACA International to sue the FCC for regulatory overreach, which lead to a landmark decision in favor of the industry that undid most of what the FCC enacted.
Since then, the FCC has been tasked with drafting a new ruling, which has not yet been released.
All four members who were named as part of the transition team are volunteers, according to the Biden-Harris transition website
