The political climate preceding the 1985 spread spectrum order was set by the Carter administration (1977 to 1981). Carter's programme was one of deregulation, which had already affected the airline, trucking and railroad industries. The White House facilitated a dialogue with regulators on basic concepts, and an interagency committee occasionally organised workshops for agencies to exchange ideas on deregulation. For example ‘labelling’ was considered a possible alternative to stricter regulation. For instance, the cigarette industry had to label its packages with the tar and nicotine contents, to be measured according to a new standard. The labelling made people conscious of the health risks, and the sales of high-tar cigarettes plummeted. This result would probably not have been reached if a regulation had been put in place with a set limit, since the political compromise necessary to get such a limit adopted would probably have resulted in a high limit for the tar and nicotine content.

The chairman of the FCC from October 1977 to February 1981, Charles Ferris, intended to extend the deregulation spirit to apply to the RF spectrum. He would like to end the practice whereby numerous requests for spectrum were brought forward, based on special cases of technology application. The motto was ‘Let us unrestrict the restricted technologies’. To that end he hired as chief scientist at the FCC in 1979 Dr Stephen Lukasik, a physicist famous for having been the director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) from 1970, during the pioneering years of the ARPAnet.