Congress is once again pushing hard to free up midband capacity for commercial use. That push matters for electronic warfare practitioners because reassigning federal and shared bands to licensed commercial use changes where and how DoD systems operate, where training and testing can happen, and what interference and deconfliction regimes will be required. The policy momentum I am seeing in committee rooms and on the Hill centers on two simple objectives: restore the FCC’s ability to run auctions and create a spectrum pipeline that forces identification and repurposing of specific frequency resources for commercial licensing. Restoring auction authority and setting binding reallocation targets may sound bureaucratic, but the operational consequences are concrete.

Brief policy facts you should know

  • The FCC’s long standing general authority to hold spectrum auctions expired in March 2023. That lapse has been a driver for several bills and hearings advocating a statutory reinstatement of auction power so the agency can schedule and complete new auctions. (Source: Congressional background on FCC auction authority.)

  • In the 119th Congress several bills and proposals are circulating. One concrete item introduced earlier this year would require the FCC to auction spectrum in a broad swath between roughly 1.3 GHz and 13.2 GHz. That text is permissive in scope and is designed to give the agency latitude to identify and conduct auctions in bands that are technically feasible to transition. (Source: H.R.651 text.)

  • The Senate Commerce Committee and other committees are treating spectrum as a national competitiveness and security priority. Recent hearings framed auction delays as a strategic disadvantage versus peer competitors and stressed that getting spectrum into commercial hands is viewed as vital to innovation and to sustaining a domestic wireless industrial base. Those political dynamics are driving proposals that would force agencies to identify and clear candidate frequencies on aggressive timelines. (Source: Senate Commerce hearing transcript.)

Why this matters for electronic warfare and spectrum-dependent defense systems

  1. Training and test footprint shrinkage. When federal frequencies are reallocated the physical and spectral space available for EW training, developmental testing, and live-fire electromagnetic maneuver exercises shrinks. That means ranges may require relocation, retuning, or tighter scheduling. For EW teams that need to exercise high-power emitters or specialized waveforms, the loss of contiguous midband spectrum can raise costs and complicate realistic training scenarios.

  2. Increased relocation and mitigation cost. Transitioning federal systems out of a band is not just a paperwork exercise. It can require hardware redesign, new filters, new antennas, re-certification for mission equipment, and complex interference mitigation. Policy proposals often talk about ‘net revenue’ for the Treasury from auctions but operational costs to retain mission capability are incurred by agencies and by taxpayers unless relocation funding and realistic timetables are included.

  3. Interference risk during the transition. Shared-use and overlay arrangements can work, but only if the technical sharing rules and enforcement regimes are clear up front. Fragmented or rushed auctions that do not accommodate known DOD footprints risk harmful interference to radars, communications links, and radio frequency sensors. That interference can be episodic and geographically variant making mitigation expensive.

  4. Technology and capability implications. EW systems are designed with certain spectral envelopes in mind. If policy forces rapid movement to different bands, platforms that cannot be readily reworked will either be constrained or require platform-level upgrades. Conversely, if new commercial deployments are carefully coordinated, they can drive innovation in adaptive radios, spectrum sensing, and dynamic coexistence tools that ultimately benefit both sides.

Practical policy design elements the EW community should be asking for now

  • Full accounting of relocation and sharing costs. Any statutory push to sell federal spectrum should mandate a rigorous, transparent accounting of relocation costs and an assured funding mechanism to cover them. Auctions that monetize federal spectrum without covering migration costs create a false economy.

  • Realistic, phased timelines tied to capability retention. Auctions should be conditioned on milestones that preserve critical military and civil services. A forced date without functional verification of relocated capabilities will produce gaps that cannot be filled by bureaucratic promises.

  • Technical coexistence frameworks before auction design. The NTIA and FCC work well when they define coexistence rules and guard bands prior to auctions. For EW this means clear emission masks, geographic protection zones, and operational coordination processes that protect radar and sensor integrity.

  • Geographic carve outs and spectrum masks for ranges and test sites. Some facilities are uniquely placed for EW training. Statutory or rule based geographic protections for ranges, or the option for in-band protected areas during agreed hours, will blunt the worst impacts of rapid commercial deployments.

  • Incentives for shared and dynamic access technologies. Where feasible, policymakers should prioritize approaches that enable spectrum sharing rather than hard transfers, because sharing preserves some operational flexibility for federal users while still enabling commercial use. That encourages development of real time sensing, database-driven access and automated deconfliction tools.

How the EW practitioner community should engage

  1. Translate technical footprints into budget justifications. Provide the program offices and committees with concrete cost estimates for relocation, hardware redesign, and the training shortfalls that would result from an accelerated pipeline.

  2. Publish test site and spectrum usage maps. The more precise your public and technical submissions to NTIA or FCC are, the less likely auctions will inadvertently target critical assets.

  3. Offer sharing and technical mitigation proposals. Don’t just oppose reallocation. Submit implementable sharing regimes that use geo-fencing, power limits, and scheduled-access protocols that allow commercial rollout while meeting defense needs.

  4. Push for enforceable mitigation funding in any legislative text. Auction proceeds can be large, but explicit, on-budget relocation and transition funding is what matters in practice.

Bottom line

The current congressional push to restore auction authority and to create a spectrum pipeline will reshape midband access for the next decade. That reshaping is not intrinsically good or bad for EW. It will be positive if transition planning is honest, if funding follows the relocations, and if technical coexistence is baked into auction design. It will be damaging if timelines are rushed, costs are undercounted, or defense operational needs are treated as an afterthought. The EW community needs to stop being surprised by legislative timetables and start providing the technical, financial, and operational inputs that will determine whether the auctions underpin resilience or introduce strategic gaps.