Legislative Hearing on Protecting Communications Networks and Improving Connectivity
22 juillet 2026
Legislative Hearing on Protecting Communications Networks and Improving Connectivity
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16:08 - 18:47
Intervenant 1
Subcommittee will come to order. The chair recognizes himself for an opening statement. Good afternoon and welcome to today's hearing. We are here to consider several bills that address important issues facing our nation's communications ecosystem. These range from securing our networks from foreign threats and robocalls to improving how we connect our rural constituents.
We all know the frustration of receiving unwanted robocalls. Americans received an estimated 4.3 billion robocalls last month alone. Although some of these calls are legal, calls that the recipient has consented to receiving, such as from a school or pharmacy, illegal robocalls continue to be a problem. In fact, fraud perpetrated against Americans by illegal robocalls costs an average of $22 billion annually, primarily affecting those who cannot afford such losses. Additionally, fraudulent robocalls make us distrustful of legitimate callers, causing us to ignore calls from unknown numbers and often miss important calls.
Congress has taken steps to address this problem. In 2019, we enacted the Pallone-Thune TRACED Act. This law took important steps to reduce illegal robocalls by requiring providers to implement call authentication, increase fines for intentional violations of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, authorized traceback efforts, and established a federal interagency working group to combat illegal robocalls. The FCC has also taken important steps to reduce illegal robocalls, both in implementing the TRACED Act and by working to block these calls from reaching our networks in the first place. Unfortunately, however, more still needs to be done.
Bad actors continue to develop new ways to enter our networks, and many of these culprits are based abroad, making them hard to track down. One of the bills we're considering today will improve our efforts to identify and catch these foreign bad actors and make it harder for their calls to enter our networks. These are meaningful steps. I want to make clear that I am well aware of the difficulties that Congress and the federal government face when trying to address this problem. Fraudsters do not follow the law, and we must be mindful of imposing new requirements that will only burden legitimate callers while doing nothing to reduce the illegal calls that harm us.
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