Trump Orders FCC To Shield Army-Navy Game From Rival Football, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That The President Could Not Yet Set The Nation's Television Schedule
WASHINGTON. President Donald Trump signed an executive order Friday titled "Preserving America's Game," directing the Federal Communications Commission to consider whether the licenses broadcasters need to stay on the air should depend in part on leaving the Army-Navy football game a television window of its own, resolving a long-standing concern that the nation's airwaves were still being scheduled by the people who own them.
The order instructs federal officials to coordinate toward an exclusive broadcast slot for the annual service-academy matchup and asks the FCC to weigh making that slot a factor in broadcast licensing, a step legal observers noted would place the federal government's power to renew or revoke a station's license in proximity to the question of which football game airs on a given Saturday afternoon in December.
The action arrived as an expanded College Football Playoff threatened to schedule games opposite the Army-Navy contest, a matchup that has held a standalone slot for decades. Rather than leave the dispute to the leagues and the networks that televise them, the administration elevated the calendar conflict to a matter of federal broadcast policy, with one official describing the order as a defense of tradition and declining to specify which statute authorizes the President to assign kickoff times.
"Nobody loves Army-Navy more than me, and we are going to protect it, very strongly," the President said, in remarks that did not address the separate questions of antitrust law, the First Amendment, or the agency's lack of authority over sports scheduling. A source within the administration added that the broadcasters carrying competing games "understand the situation," noting that the same commission reviewing their conduct also reviews their licenses.
The order is the second in as many months to route a sports-governance preference through federal power, following the President's directive instructing agencies to use education funding as leverage over college athletics. Taken together, the two actions establish that the machinery of the federal government, including its control over the airwaves, may now be pointed at the problem of who is permitted to play football when.
At press time, the FCC had announced it would study whether the Constitution's allocation of enumerated powers could be read to include a protected window for the flagship game it had previously assumed belonged to the networks.