On 30 April 2026 the FCC adopted FCC 26-28, the Second Report and Order, Order on Reconsideration, and Second Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking in ET Docket No. 24-136. The final rule was published in the Federal Register on 15 May 2026 at 91 FR 27843 and is effective 15 June 2026. It is the second installment in the Commission's Equipment Authorization Integrity proceeding, building on the May 2025 First EA Integrity Report and Order that established the prohibited-entity framework and the 10% foreign-adversary ownership bar.
Where the first order was about exclusion — de-recognizing labs controlled by foreign adversaries — the second is about incentives. The Commission's own language is that this action shifts the framework from reactive exclusion to prevention, and the centerpiece is a fast-track lane in the Pre-Approval Guidance process for applications tested in what the rule now calls Trusted Test Labs.
What is a Trusted Test Lab?
The Order defines a Trusted Test Lab as a measurement facility located in the United States or in the territory of an economy with which the United States has negotiated reciprocal treatment through a Mutual Recognition Agreement or a trade agreement with comparable conformity-assessment reciprocity provisions. The FCC participates in eight MRAs: APEC TEL, CITEL (Organization of American States), the EU, EFTA, Japan, Israel, Mexico, and the United Kingdom. OET is directed to publish and maintain a list of these Reciprocal Economies so TCBs and applicants can identify in advance which foreign labs qualify for the fast-track lane.
The reasoning the Commission cites is jurisdictional: U.S. labs and TCBs are subject to U.S. law and can be compelled to respond to FCC inquiries, and labs in Reciprocal Economies are similarly bound by the terms of the reciprocal agreement. The Order observes that foreign actors in non-Reciprocal Economies have used the Hague Service Convention to evade accountability for repeated equipment-authorization violations.
How does the fast-track PAG process actually work?
Under § 2.964 the Commission's Office of Engineering and Technology publishes the Pre-Approval Guidance list — the categories of equipment for which TCBs must obtain Commission guidance through the KDB inquiry system before issuing a grant. A modern smartphone may fall under several PAG items. PAG review can run several months; in 2025 OET processed 1,202 PAG-list items across roughly 3,369 PAG applications.
The revised § 2.964(a) directs OET to create two distinct lines. The first is a streamlined PAG list with fewer equipment categories, applicable to applications tested in Trusted Test Labs and entitled to priority review. The second is the existing general PAG list for applications using other labs. OET is also directed to make the PAG-processing time metrics publicly available, both to drive administrative improvements and to quantify the time-savings the fast-track option delivers. The specific categories on the streamlined list will be set by a forthcoming OET public notice — that is the next operational document to watch.
The Commission's own baseline numbers from 2024: 3.6 % of FCC IDs were tested in U.S. labs and 12.5 % in MRA-country labs, for roughly 16 % combined in Trusted-Lab territory. The fast-track lane is explicitly designed to shift that ratio, and the Order pairs it with the observation that the Commission has ceased to recognize 21 labs in the months leading up to the rule's release.
What new disclosures do test labs and TCBs have to file on 15 June?
Effective on the general 15 June 2026 effective date, new § 2.951(a)(12) requires recognized measurement facilities to disclose the number and location of all employees or agents engaged in FCC-recognized testing and/or certification, including those based outside the United States. New § 2.960(a)(8) imposes the parallel requirement on TCBs, framed as a demonstration of impartiality and compliance with Commission rules. The disclosure is at designation and renewal, with updates whenever the information changes.
The Commission explicitly rules out collection of personal addresses or personally identifiable information except as part of an investigation; what it wants is the business address where the employee actually performs the testing or reviews the certification application. The rationale — articulated against pushback from China's State Administration for Market Regulation and from LGAI Technological Center — is that certain foreign national-security laws can coerce corporate cooperation with state intelligence, and a foreign government's ability to compel a lab is strongest where it has jurisdiction over the lab's employees and physical testing sites. The Commission's view is that location data is necessary to assess compliance with the impartiality requirements that ISO/IEC 17025 and 17065 already impose.
Which amendments are delayed, and why?
Five amendments are carved out of the 15 June effective date because they create new or modified information-collection requirements subject to OMB review under the Paperwork Reduction Act: § 2.949(b)(5) and (6) and (d) (laboratory accreditation bodies), § 2.951(a)(10) and (11) and (c) (test labs), and § 2.962(d)(9) (TCBs). All five impose the same substantive obligation in their respective domain — certification to the Commission that the entity is not owned, controlled, or directed by a prohibited entity under § 2.902, plus documentation of any entity holding equity or voting interests of 5 % or greater, with 30-day updates on change.
The substance of these obligations was already adopted in the First EA Integrity R&O at 90 FR 38045 (7 August 2025) and the August 2025 correction at 90 FR 41385. What FCC 26-28 changes in the delayed text is the trigger for the 30-day reporting clock for U.S. publicly traded companies — see the Garmin reconsideration below. The FCC has stated it will publish a separate Federal Register document announcing the effective date once OMB review of the delayed amendments completes.
What did the Garmin reconsideration change?
Garmin International filed a petition for reconsideration on 8 September 2025, arguing that the First EA Integrity R&O's 30-day ownership-reporting clock — running from the effective date of any change in 5%-or-greater ownership — was incompatible with the SEC's Exchange Act Rule 13d-1 timeline that publicly traded companies actually operate on. A public company often learns of a new 5 % holder only when that holder files Schedule 13D or 13G; the FCC's original wording could in principle put the company in violation before it had any way to know about the underlying ownership change.
The Order on Reconsideration grants the petition. The amended §§ 2.949(d), 2.951(c), and 2.962(d)(9) now provide that for U.S. publicly traded companies the 30-day clock starts from actual knowledge of the change — such as the filing of the relevant Schedule 13D or 13G — rather than from the effective date of the change itself. Privately held labs, TCBs, and accreditation bodies continue to run on the effective-date trigger because they are presumed to have contemporaneous knowledge of changes to their own ownership.
What else does the Order direct OET to build?
Four operational directives sit behind the rule changes and will produce follow-on documents over the coming months. First, OET is directed to publish a separate Federal Register notice listing the Reciprocal Economies whose labs qualify as Trusted Test Labs. Second, OET will release a public notice setting the equipment-category content of the streamlined Trusted-Lab PAG list. Third, OET is directed to revise its post-market surveillance procedures — currently published as KDB 610077, last revised April 2022 — to address sampling-rate questions raised by TCBs, escalation procedures when grantees are uncooperative, and greater public transparency when surveillance discovers significant noncompliance. Fourth, OET is directed to stand up a confidential reporting channel for industry participants to flag suspected violations and national-security concerns, and to publish a consolidated human-readable and (where feasible) machine-readable list of prohibited entities under § 2.902, drawing together the FCC Covered List, BIS Entity List, Treasury, Homeland Security, and statutory sources that the current rule already references separately.
What should a U.S. test lab do on or before 15 June?
- Inventory employees engaged in FCC-recognized testing and certification by business address. The new disclosure is keyed to where the employee actually conducts the work, not to where the legal entity is headquartered. Map any cross-border test execution, sample handling, or remote review.
- Audit the impartiality and outsourcing controls already required under ISO/IEC 17025 (test labs) and ISO/IEC 17065 (TCBs) against the new location disclosure. The Commission is treating location data as evidence of impartiality, and an outsourced foreign reviewer who was previously invisible in the accreditation file will be visible after 15 June.
- For publicly traded entities in the chain, align the FCC ownership-reporting calendar with SEC Schedule 13D/13G monitoring. The Garmin reconsideration moved the trigger to actual knowledge but kept the 30-day clock.
- Track the forthcoming OET public notices: the Reciprocal-Economies list, the Trusted-Lab streamlined PAG list, the revised post-market surveillance procedures, and the consolidated prohibited-entity list. Each of these will materially affect how a lab routes work and screens clients.
- Defer any structural decisions about overseas testing partnerships until the streamlined Trusted-Lab PAG list and the Reciprocal-Economies list are both published — those two documents together define which non-U.S. labs actually deliver the fast-track benefit.
What does CTS take from this for client work?
For manufacturers in the PAG-relevant categories — and that is most modern wireless equipment, from cellular handsets through unlicensed-band radios to RF-emitting medical devices — the fast-track lane is a tangible scheduling advantage that is materially easier to capture from a U.S. lab than from any foreign alternative. The Commission's own conservative estimate is roughly $218,000 in annual cost savings to applicants using U.S.-based test labs and a further $552,000 for applicants using Trusted Test Labs outside the U.S., on the assumption that the fast track affects 10 % of domestic PAG applications and saves 32 hours of technical-staff time per expedited application.
Those numbers are conservative on their face — the Commission acknowledges they exclude any benefit from faster time-to-market and assume domestic PAG volume stays flat. The actual market signal is the de-recognition of 21 labs cited in the Order, combined with the FNPRM still pending alongside this rule that would further restrict labs in non-Reciprocal Economies. The supply of recognized testing capacity outside the Trusted-Lab definition is contracting, and the fast-track lane is the carrot that pairs with that stick.