On Friday, December 5th, the FCC’s Media Bureau announced a new compliance deadline for the revised foreign sponsorship identification (“FSID”) rules. The compliance deadline changed from December 8, 2025 to June 7, 2026.

The revised FSID rules, which were adopted in June 2024, require broadcasters to assess whether a buyer of program time on the station is a foreign government or an agent a foreign government. Most controversially, under these enhanced FSID rules, “program time” includes political issue ads and paid public service announcements. The FCC prepared a certification form that can be used by broadcasters as one of two ways to obtain the necessary information, but the form was not approved by the Office of Management and Budget until the summer of 2025. Thus, the FCC originally set the compliance deadline for December 8, 2025. Given the breadth of paid programming and spot buys to which the revised FSID rules apply, the extension of the compliance deadline to the summer of 2026 is welcome news.

The prior FSID Rules are currently in effect and require diligence for all “leases of airtime,” which the FCC has previously defined as “any agreement in which a licensee makes a discrete block of broadcast time on its station available to be programmed by another party”—i.e., via “programming provided or selected by the programmer”—“in return for some form of compensation.” Programming determined to be paid or furnished by a foreign government, or agent thereof, must follow enhanced disclosure obligations.