Second Economist Named To FCC Transition

President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team announced Monday that it has tapped a second economist to help oversee transition issues at the FCC: Mark A. Jamison, a University of Florida economist with expertise in telephone and public utilities issues.

Jamison, 60, joins Jeffrey A. Eisenach, 58, who was previously identified as being on the transition team for the FCC.

Like Eisenach before him, Jamison declined comment on his plans for the FCC’s transition — and on whether he intends to vie to chair the FCC for the new administration.

Jamison and Eisenach, along with sharing economics backgrounds, are also both affiliated with the American Enterprise Institute think tank in Washington, Eisenach as a visiting scholar and director of AEI’s Center for Internet, Communications and Technology Policy, and Jamison as a visiting fellow with the center.

Like Eisenach, Jamison has an antipathy toward the FCC’s net-neutrality regs — rules aimed at requiring internet service providers like Comcast and AT&T to treat internet traffic equally.

“Net neutrality as practiced in the US is failing,” said Jamison in a June paper that he co-authored for AEI. “The policy has become a growing miscellany of ex ante regulations that frequently work against the entrepreneurs and consumers the rules are intended to help.”

“As far as I know, they’re peas in a pod,” said Matt Wood, policy director of the watchdog Free Press, of the two economists.

Eisenach, who favors free markets, is well known in media industry policy circles, having served as a consultant to the National Association of Broadcasters, the Walt Disney Co., and the NCTA–The Internet & Television Association.

Jamison, who is currently director of the University of Florida’s Public Utility Research Center and was formerly a manager of regulatory policy for Sprint in Kansas City, Mo., is largely unknown to Washington media industry insiders.

While Eisenach has written detailed economic reports supporting broadcast industry positions on the incentive auction, retransmission consent and ownership deregulation, much of Jamison’s career has been focused on telephony and utility issues, according to his bio.

Jamison, who like Eisenach has a Ph.D. in economics, also was formerly head of research for the Iowa Utilities Board and a communications economist for the Kansas Corporation Commission, according to his bio.

From 1980 into 1984, Jamison was a teacher at Paola High School in Paola, Kan., and in 1980 was field manager for the Farm Management Association at the University of Nebraska, according to his bio.

Even assuming neither Eisenach nor Jamison wants the FCC’s top job, or President-elect Trump wants somebody else to head the agency, the two economists could have some influence over who gets the nod.

Other potential candidates for the FCC’s top slot include the agency’s two sitting Republican commissioners — Ajit Pai and Michael O’Rielly.