More than 100 companies and trade associations have written to two senior Trump administration officials asking them to oppose a spectrum plan put forward by navigation company NextNav, warning that an upcoming Federal Communications Commission proposal on GPS backups could adopt key elements of it.

In letters sent Thursday to Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett, the coalition said it fears the FCC's forthcoming proposal "may incorporate elements of NextNav's proposal."

The lobbying push, reported from Washington on October 2, 2026, represents the latest escalation in a dispute over how the United States should build resilient backup navigation and timing capabilities to GPS — a policy debate that has pitted NextNav against a broad swath of commercial spectrum users since the company petitioned the FCC for rights to spectrum in the lower 900 MHz band.

The letter's recipients matter. Duffy, as Transportation Secretary, oversees departments that depend heavily on precise positioning and timing — aviation, maritime, rail and highway systems among them. Hassett, directing the National Economic Council, coordinates telecom and spectrum policy across federal agencies. By targeting both, the coalition is attempting to move the fight beyond the FCC's normal comment process and into the White House's interagency machinery.

The coalition's core concern is straightforward: if the FCC's pending GPS backup proposal draws on NextNav's plan, spectrum arrangements that NextNav has requested could be locked in through a rulemaking that was framed as a public-resilience measure rather than a commercial spectrum reallocation. That would give one company significant influence over how a national PNT architecture takes shape.

For the telecom sector, the stakes center on the lower 900 MHz band and adjacent spectrum. Critics of the NextNav plan have long argued that granting the company's request could constrain existing and future commercial wireless uses of that range. The letter reflects that worry — over 100 signatories spanning companies and trade associations, a breadth that suggests the opposition now reaches well beyond NextNav's direct competitors in the navigation market.

The FCC has been working on a framework for complementing GPS with terrestrial backup navigation and timing capabilities, a project with statutory roots in federal PNT policy. NextNav's petition, filed with the commission, proposed using its licensed spectrum holdings to deliver such a service commercially. The company argues its network can provide a resilient alternative to satellite-based GPS, whose signals are weak and vulnerable to jamming and spoofing.

Opponents counter that the FCC should not hand a single licensee what amounts to a government-endorsed anchor position in a national backup system without a competitive process. The coalition's letter to Duffy and Hassett presses that argument at the political level, asking the administration's economic and transportation leadership to intervene before the FCC's proposal is finalized.

The timing signals urgency. The FCC's proposal on GPS backups is described as forthcoming, and the signatories clearly want to shape it before circulation among commissioners rather than after. Once a draft order or notice of proposed rulemaking reaches the commission's open-meeting agenda, changing its central architecture becomes far harder.

NextNav has not conceded ground in the face of prior opposition, and the company's bet — that the federal appetite for GPS resilience gives its plan policy traction — has kept the petition alive at the FCC. The administration has not publicly responded to the letters, and the FCC has not said when it will release its proposal.

What happens next depends on whether Duffy and Hassett engage, and on how much of NextNav's architecture survives into the FCC's draft. With more than 100 companies now pressing the White House directly, the coalition has signaled it will contest the plan at every level of the process until the commission's GPS backup framework is published.