The conservative Wall Street Journal editorial board laid into President Donald Trump on Monday evening for his latest $17 billion effort to interfere in the telecommunications market.
"President Trump has now rescued Charlie Ergen’s EchoStar from bankruptcy after his first-term attempt to boost the telecom company flopped," wrote the board, which has grown exasperated with Trump over his tariff wars in recent months. "EchoStar on Monday announced it will sell a large swath of wireless spectrum licenses to Elon Musk’s SpaceX for $17 billion to boost its Starlink satellite network. This follows EchoStar’s deal last month to sell $23 billion in spectrum licenses to AT&T. While the sales will benefit telecom consumers, the biggest winner is Mr. Ergen."
This entire deal, forced by Trump and his regulators to prevent embarrassing headlines about a major bankruptcy on his watch, essentially takes EchoStar out of the wireless industry, which it was only in because of another intervention by Trump in his first term, the board argued.
"As a condition for approving Sprint’s merger with T-Mobile in 2019, the Trump team required the carriers to sell spectrum and Sprint’s pre-paid Boost wireless business to Dish Network, now owned by EchoStar," wrote the board. "Dish had spent years stockpiling spectrum. The Administration’s goal was to stand up a fourth competitor to the Big Three carriers."
"We’re told that Mr. Ergen met with Mr. Trump in June in an effort to prevent the FCC from reclaiming EchoStar’s licenses and putting them up for auction," noted the board. "Republicans in Congress believed an auction could raise tens of billions of dollars for the government. It would also let companies bid competitively for EchoStar’s idle spectrum" — but Trump didn't want that to happen because it would make his economic record look worse.
Making the whole thing more embarrassing, the board wrote, EchoStar announced the AT&T sale as a move to “enable rapid deployment of the purchased spectrum to U.S. consumers across the country” — effectively a confession they are "being rewarded for warehousing spectrum and selling licenses for a higher value than he paid for them," which the law is supposed to stop.
Democrats, too, have interfered in telecom operations for political gain, the board concluded, but with the GOP in power now, "their rampant regulatory intervention in markets on behalf of businesses that do their bidding is giving Democrats the evidence to build a case that Republicans are the new kings of crony capitalism."
