Austin Bonner is the Assistant Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology for spectrum and telecom policy. As part of a growing tech team inside OSTP, Austin develops telecommunications policies that advance prosperity, security, environmental quality, and justice for all Americans. Austin provides expertise and OSTP leadership in a variety of interagency processes and White House working groups on spectrum policy, communications security and reliability, and wireless innovation.
Austin joined OSTP from the Federal Communications Commission, where she served as Legal Advisor and Acting Chief of Staff to Commissioner Geoffrey Starks. In that role, Austin helped shape new FCC programs designed to promote broadband access and affordability in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, including the Emergency Broadband Benefit and the Affordable Connectivity Program. She served as Commissioner Starks’s principal policy advisor on wireline and public safety issues and, later in her tenure, on media and consumer protection issues. She also led Commissioner Starks’s media outreach efforts and acted as his primary liaison to the press.
Before joining the FCC, Austin practiced communications and appellate law at two leading D.C. law firms. Her practice included regulatory challenges, constitutional law, and statutory interpretation, with a particular focus on complex technologies and telecommunications. Austin also clerked for Judge D. Michael Fisher of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.
Austin serves as an adjunct professor at the Georgetown University Law Center, where she received her J.D. magna cum laude. She earned a bachelor’s degree with high honors from the University of Texas at Austin. When not working on telecom policy, Austin is, slowly, improving her French and ukulele skills and teaching two very rowdy goldendoodles to respect people’s personal space.
