In April 2009, President Barack Obama nominated Clyburn to a vacant Democratic seat on the Federal Communications Commission. Clyburn initially was appointed to serve the unexpired term of Jonathan Adelstein, who left the Commission to take up a post in the U.S. Department of Agriculture. In July 2009, Clyburn was confirmed to a full five-year term; her appointment was unanimously confirmed by the Senate. Clyburn began a second five-year term on the FCC in January 2013, having been nominated by Obama and confirmed by the Senate. In May 2013, Obama designated Clyburn as acting chairwoman of the FCC, a position she held until Tom Wheeler was appointed chairman in October 2013. Clyburn's five-year term ended on June 30, 2017, but pursuant to federal law, Clyburn remains on the Commission until her successor is sworn in or until the 115th Congress ends in January 2019. On the FCC, Clyburn has led efforts to limit the costs of inmate telephone calls in the United States, which can reach exorbitant rates amounting to up to $54 a call. In 2015, Clyburn, alongside fellow Democratic commissioners Wheeler and Jessica Rosenworcel, voted to adopt the FCC Open Internet Order, a regulation protecting net neutrality in the United States. In 2017, after Donald Trump became president, Republicans took control of the FCC for the first time in Clyburn's tenure on the commission, and she was for a time the Commission's sole Democratic member. The new Republican-majority Commission under Chairman Ajit Pai sought to reverse FCC initiatives that had occurred under Obama, Clyburn mounted "a vigorous defense of the FCC's pro-consumer policies." After Pai revoked several Obama-era consumer-protection regulations and closed the FCC's inquiry into the telecommunications industry's controversial practice of zero-rating, Clyburn described the moves as an unlawful violation of the "basic principle of administrative procedure that actions must be accompanied by reasons for that action." Clyburn has been a vocal advocate of preserving net neutrality in the United States. In May 2017, Clyburn dissented from the Commission's issuance of a notice of proposed rulemaking to repeal net neutrality and strongly criticized the proposal. In December 2017, Clyburn dissented from the FCC's reversal of the 2015 Open Internet Order. The repeal measure, championed by Pai, passed in a 3-2 party line vote. Congressman Jerry McNerney had requested to deliver remarks during the hearing, but was denied. Clyburn submitted his statement as part of the record. Clyburn has also clashed with Pai over the Lifeline Program for Low-Income Consumers, a federal program that has subsidized phone access for low-income Americans since the 1980s. In 2016, Clyburn led an effort to include broadband access in the program for the first time, in order to close the digital divide. Pai countered this effort the following year, by terminating the participation of nine telecommunications companies in the program, a move that Clyburn strongly criticized.
