The FCC announced that it suspended operations at 12:01 a.m. on Wednesday after Congress failed to reach an agreement on funding the federal government.
Although the FCC’s website will remain online, it will not be updated except for matters related to spectrum auction activities and threats to life and property. Most filing deadlines that fall during the shutdown will be extended with submissions due the next business day after the commission resumes normal operations.For radio stations, that includes the deadline for submitting EAS Form One, which is Oct. 3. Oct. 10, meanwhile, is the deadline for stations to submit quarterly issues and program lists for Q3 to their public file.
Service availability
The only exceptions where deadlines will not be extended are for filings for the Network Outage Reporting System (NORS) and Disaster Information Reporting System (DIRS) as well as all filings and deadlines related to spectrum auction activities; provider responses to Broadband Data Collection (BDC) challenges, verification or audit requests. For most deadlines for enforcement matters and investigations, there are also no extensions, but they are at the discretion of the FCC’s Enforcement Bureau.
The FCC’s Electronic Comment Filing System (ECFS) and Integrated Spectrum Auction System (ISAS) will have support only for auction-related activities, while the Broadband Data Collection (BDC) system, National Broadband Map, Antenna Structure Registration System (ASR) and Robocall Mitigation Database (RMD) will be available, but with no user support.
All other FCC electronic filing and database systems, including its Fee Filer System, will be unavailable. However, no deadline for payments of any type is being extended, unless applicants are only able to pay through the Fee Filer. In those cases, the applicable due date is extended in the same manner as the due dates for other regulatory filings herein, the FCC said.
“Otherwise, we expect payments to be timely made through the use of US Bank as they normally would if normal operations had not been suspended,” the commission said in its public notice.
FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, who chaired a monthly meeting on Tuesday that was briefly interrupted by protestors, told attendees at the SCTE Tech Expo on Monday that they commission was prepared.
“We have been hard at work the last couple of weeks preparing for a possible government shutdown,” Carr said. “Hopefully we don’t get there, but we do have a game plan in place.”
