Sammies finalist helped design lucrative spectrum auction process for FCC

Federal Drive with Tom Temin

The electromagnetic spectrum that our phones, radios and TVs rely on is a scare commodity and figuring out how to allocate it in the most sensible way has been a challenge for the past century. The way the Federal Communications Commission does it now, particularly when it comes to cell phones, is based on a complex auction process. The idea is to use market forces to make the most efficient use of the spectrum. Those auctions have generated more than $200 billion in revenue to the federal government so far. Our next guest is one of the designers of the modern-day process. Evan Kwerel is a senior economic advisor at the FCC, where he’s spent more than three decades working on the problem. And he’s a finalist for this year’s Service to America Medals. He talked about his work with Federal News Network’s Jared Serbu on Federal Drive with Tom Temin.

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