An $88 billion tug-of-war over America’s airwaves is pitting the Pentagon against telecom giants — with wireless speeds, national security, and the size of the national debt hanging in the balance.
The House Energy and Commerce Committee ignited the fight when it advanced a budget bill that would restore the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) auction authority and require the sale of mid-band spectrum. However, the proposed provision to President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” noticeably excluded one contested piece of the spectrum — the 3.1 to 3.45 GHz band, which Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz and his allies want cleared for licensed commercial use. Cruz’s stance has earned him a number of critical attack ads from at least one group with ties to the cable industry.
The fate of that slice of military-held radio spectrum is hotly contested. Mobile carriers say that auctioning it commercially could supercharge consumers’ wireless speeds. But the Defense Department warns that auctioning it off could cripple missile defense systems, and lawmakers must now decide who gets to control this coveted resource.
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Cruz, who chairs the Senate Commerce Committee, said his “preference is not to block off any particular bands” in a Tuesday interview with Communications Daily, adding that he’s “actively considering” what to include in the Senate’s upcoming reconciliation bill. The senator has long lamented what he calls “spectrum squatting” by federal agencies — “particularly bureaucrats at the Pentagon under the direction of Mark Milley” — and has framed reopening the lower 3 GHz band as a chance to slash the deficit with auction revenue. Neither the senator’s office nor the Senate Commerce Committee responded to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s requests for comment.
Mobile carriers yearn for these radio frequencies because they sit in a Goldilocks zone for wireless service — low enough to carry signals long distances, but high enough to move large amounts of data quickly. Clearing it for commercial use would unlock prime real estate for providers like AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile to expand their 5G and 6G networks. None of the three mobile providers responded to the DCNF’s request for comment.
The Pentagon, on the other hand, mainly uses the band for radar and missile defense systems and cautions that the end of its spectrum monopoly, which stretches back to the Truman administration, could hamstring important military operations.
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In 2023, then-Joint Chairman Gen. Mark Milley said he “firmly believe[s] we should wait” before touching the band at a Senate Armed Services hearing, calling spectrum a “measure twice, cut once sort of thing” and warning that a private-sector auction could carry “severe national security implications.”
Further complicating matters, cable companies like Comcast and Charter have historically favored unlicensed and shared spectrum use. According to Roslyn Layton, an author and tech policy scholar based in Denmark, this is because such a situation lets them offer mobile and broadband services without paying billions for exclusive spectrum licenses. Their mobile offerings rely on WiFi and Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) bands. An auction that favors exclusive-use carriers like AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile, on the other hand, could erode that advantage. Neither Comcast nor Charter responded to the DCNF’s requests for comment.
The fight has already divided not just Washington, but Republicans as well. On one side, budget hawks want to auction the airwaves off for exclusive commercial use, while defense hawks argue for sharing — or shelving — the frequencies on national security grounds. At stake is as much as $88 billion in potential auction revenue.
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The split also extends to former Trump administration staff. Two former Trump-era FCC officials, both of whom requested anonymity in order to speak candidly, voiced radically different stances in interviews with the Daily Caller News Foundation. According to one, the Pentagon’s warnings may mask more mundane motives, with agencies sometimes “arguing … on behalf of other people who have a vested interest in that spectrum not being repurposed.” However, the other official countered that the plan “doesn’t make any sense.”
“The amount of money we’re talking about here is peanuts,” he told the DCNF. “$90 billion over 10 years? We’re 30-something trillion in debt; I don’t want to hear that we need to make spectrum policy based on a tax cut … These things just should not be tied together at all.”
Think tankers take a more uniformly pro-auction stance. For instance, Layton argued that spectrum is a popular asset, not a military one.
“The spectrum belongs to the American people. The airwaves belong to the American people … the DOD doesn’t own it. It doesn’t belong to them; they get to borrow it to deliver defense to us,” she told the DCNF.
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“They’ve cried wolf a lot,” she added. “And now it’s hard to believe them. It’s hard to take them at face value about this challenge, because if that’s the case, then how can you adapt to these other environments in the Pacific?
Joe Kane, director of broadband and spectrum policy at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), seemed similarly skeptical that commercial use of the band would meaningfully compromise American national security, or the safety of American citizens.
“They say, ‘Look, this is the spectrum we need to have in order to detect an incoming nuke. If you take that away from us, then we’re not going to be able to detect the nukes,’” he told the DCNF. “On the other side of that is, if you have a receiver that is so vulnerable that there’s no way to make it work when there are cell phones around, then that’s a pretty fragile system … What’s the plan for when you’re operating in the Taiwan Strait and the Chinese are intentionally jamming you?”
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However, those skeptical of the idea are still aggressively making their case. One anti-auction group, Patriots for American Security (PAS), bought a full-page ad in the New York Post on May 4 accusing Cruz of trying to “give our military spectrum to the Germans” — positioning an auction as a giveaway to T-Mobile, which is majority-owned by a German parent company — a concern, PAS wrote, because “German government mocked your America First agenda.” Cruz, for his part, has framed the potential auction as a fiscal and geopolitical win — a way to keep pace with China’s wireless dominance while putting an $88 billion dent in the federal deficit. Another group, Defend US PAC, has also run ads opposing spectrum auctions. Defend US PAC’s recent FEC filings indicate that it draws funding from a number of dark money groups, as well as from Southern Plains Cable LLC, an Oklahoma-based cable company.
China has allocated three to four times more mid-band spectrum for commercial wireless use than the U.S., Layton said.
“We use more 5G than anyone, but we do it on the smallest amount of frequency because American carriers have been so efficient … Now that is, of course, dependent upon enough mid-band spectrum, and that spectrum is now, next year, going to be running out,” she said. Still, experts like Kane, say the gap might be overstated, arguing “it’s not as though we’re at capacity of our spectrum right now.”
Cruz pitches the auction as a rare chance to chip away at the deficit without raising taxes.
“I am fighting hard for spectrum to be part of the reconciliation bill. In that bill, you’ve got to pay for a whole lot. And a spectrum auction is a big, big pay-for,” Cruz said at a Free State Foundation conference in March, according to Broadband Breakfast.
Whoever wins this battle, the outcome will shape whether Washington keeps pace with China’s telecom advances, how quickly the U.S. rolls out 5G and 6G networks, and whether anyone pockets the billions in potential revenue involved.
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First published by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
