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President Joe Biden chose Jessica Rosenworcel to lead the Federal Communications Commission as interim chair, making the 49-year-old lawyer and podcast host from West Hartford, Connecticut the second woman to be appointed to this role during 96 years of the commission. the story. The job involves such daunting tasks as helping millions of Americans gain reliable access to the Internet.
Rosenworcel, already a member of the commission, is not only the second woman to lead the FCC (the first, Mignon Clyburn, served for almost 6 months as interim president, in 2013), she is also the first mother to run the agency. She has two school-aged children, and when not crafting national tech and media laws, she is trying to make sure her children do their schoolwork remotely during the pandemic.
“I find myself – like a lot of people – playing a lot of different roles. One moment I’m making a phone call in the office, another I’m video talking in an online conference, and yet another I’m a fixer and Wi-Fi snackmaker. My days are full! She told the technology news site Protocol in December.
Although Rosenworcel declined to be interviewed for this article, her public comments and statements from her colleagues reflect how this role has influenced her political priorities. During her tenure at the agency, she coined the term “homework gap” in 2014 to describe the overlap between families who don’t have broadband access at home and students who need homework. ‘Internet for homework. She advocated for better broadband access in rural areas with high maternal mortality rates and poor internet access, to help women who live far from an obstetric center to receive care. And Rosenworcel has used her platform as a commissioner at the FCC to elevate women in tech, launching the first podcast of any regulatory agency in the United States, Broadband Conversations, where she only interviews women. Recently, this included a group of school superintendents from across the country discussing the challenges of moving school online during the pandemic.
“More and more of our lives are spent online, on phones, on video chats, and how it all works for the people of our country is something she understands,” said US Representative Anna Eshoo. , a Democrat representing Silicon Valley in California. you don’t have to have an in-depth political conversation to try to get her across the line on this – it’s already there. “
Veteran CAF
Rosenworcel came to the FCC more than 20 years ago in 1999, before leaving the agency to serve as congressional assistant in 2007, as senior communications advisor for the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation. In 2012, she returned to the FCC, where she was appointed commissioner under President Barack Obama. It was renamed in 2017 by President Donald Trump while the FCC was led by President Ajit Pai in its historic cancellation of the country’s network neutrality protections.
Now, as the president’s choice to run the agency, she is likely to pick up the torch of network neutrality – which prohibited ISPs from charging websites to reach users at faster speeds. When President Tom Wheeler was running the agency under Obama, Rosenworcel boldly pushed him to create more aggressive net neutrality rules, a position he eventually took and which led to the net neutrality protections that were adopted in 2015. And when Pai took over as head of the agency with the intention of bringing a “weedkiller” to net neutrality in 2017, she didn’t sit still either.
“Let’s roar. Let’s make a row. Let’s stop this plan in its tracks, ”she tweeted in 2017, when Pai released his plan to repeal the net neutrality rules. More than 22 million comments were submitted to the agency in response to the removal of Internet traffic rules.
Homework gap
When it comes to distance education, Rosenworcel knows she’s one of the lucky parents with internet access at home. According to data from the FCC, about a third of American households do not have reliable broadband access, which for millions of American families means their children are struggling to continue their education while schools stay. closed. But long before the pandemic, Rosenworcel hit the road, speaking to students, parents and teachers across the country to learn more about the difficulties students face in connecting to the internet, for years urging the commission to reform its policies to better serve families struggling for the Internet.
As the school year drew to a close for the summer of 2016, Rosenworcel accompanied former Senator Tom Udall, a Democrat from New Mexico, on a trip to the small rural community of Hatch, New Mexico. , to visit a high school to talk to students. and teachers on how they connect.
At Hatch, she met Jonah Madrid, a student of the soccer team who told her that after the last school bell, he and his teammates were piling up on a bus, sometimes traveling for up to an hour and a half to a nearby town. playing a game, after which he sat in the school parking lot at night with his laptop open to do his homework in the dark because his family did not have internet at home. It’s a story she often remembers in her speeches as Commissioner. A 2017 Senate Joint Economic Committee study on the lack of homework showed Madrid to be far from alone. About 12 million school-aged children live in homes without a broadband connection, research shows.
So in March, when thousands of schools quickly closed their doors to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, Rosenworcel took action and began supporting proposals to help students who did not have access to the internet. at home to connect and continue their education.
“[T]The FCC should use its power in this emergency to provide schools with Wi-Fi hotspots to lend to students who do not have reliable internet access at home, ”she wrote in an editorial on the technology news site, The Verge. The FCC has the power to help students connect online in times of need, such as the pandemic, by updating the E-rate program, she said, which is the largest tech program in the world. education in the country.
Maternal mortality
Historically, technology policy initiatives have not tended to integrate the health needs of pregnant women into their planning. But Rosenworcel has traveled to meet with doctors who serve rural areas to discuss how better access to telehealth services could help pregnant women in areas of the country that lack nearby hospitals.
In 2019, Rosenworcel traveled to Little Rock, Arkansas, where she met with healthcare providers who often treat women who are living off hours because there are no options. closer to obstetric care, a task that becomes particularly difficult when pregnant women must be under special supervision or have complications with their pregnancy that require several visits to the doctor per week for follow-up before and after childbirth.
Rosenworcel recalled one such story she heard in testimony presented to the home energy and commerce committee in 2019, when nurses and doctors in Little Rock had a patient with severe complications after her pregnancy can lead to maternal mortality. She needed daily monitoring at a special obstetrics center, but the patient lived hours away.
“So this team at the medical center got creative,” Rosenworcel said in her testimony. “They sent her home with a blood pressure cuff, a scale to monitor her weight, and a pulse oximeter to measure the oxygen levels in her blood. He was told to connect all of these devices to a wireless gateway and transmit the daily readings to the medical center. But the patient had no internet or cell service at home – she lived in a dead zone. So when she returned after giving birth, she had to drive her truck up a hill every day to return her vitals to the hospital, Rosenworcel said.
The stories of people she met on the road seem to drive Rosenworcel. She came up with ideas that would help hospitals in rural areas connect to broadband to receive specialist and expert care, even at great distances. Since addressing the issue, lawmakers have introduced bipartisan bills in the House and Senate, which Rosenworcel has approved, aimed at improving access to telehealth in rural communities and areas with high rates of death. maternal mortality.
Autonomous
While Rosenworcel talks little about his private life, glimpses leak here and there. She mentioned in her podcast that she had already considered becoming a ski instructor before eventually tackling tech policy. His brother, Brian, is a drummer for the rock band Guster. And recently, during the pandemic, her family adopted a rescue dog, Bo, she revealed in her interview with Protocol.
But lawmakers like Senator Ben Luján, a Democrat from New Mexico, were struck by the compassion she showed in meeting the public in schools and libraries for the stories people shared with her. “People felt comfortable talking to Commissioner Rosenworcel because she listened to them. And she took everything she learned from listening to them and translated it into troubleshooting and problem solving and she got down to business, ”he said. “This is the reputation of Commissioner Rosenworcel. She rolls up her sleeves, gets to work and gets things done.
But she also seems poised to introduce changes. On the first anniversary of her podcast in 2019, one of her staff who interviewed her asked her what advice she gives to young people considering entering the public service.
She replied, “I think my main advice is to ask permission less. There are so many things I managed to do because I looked left and right and thought I had to do something here. We have to move. We have to go fast. If I asked permission from everyone around me, it won’t happen.
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