The Biden Treasury Department has issued final rules for distributing $350 billion in COVID recovery funds, including uses for broadband.
Unfortunately, these poorly crafted rules are a dramatic departure from Treasury’s original draft rules. They would open the door for massive waste and duplication of existing programs, repeating the mistakes of the past build-outs. As Yogi Berra famously said, “It’s like deja vu all over again.”
The federal government has a key role to play in deploying broadband to areas with little or no access to high-speed internet. Yet instead of prioritizing these communities, the Treasury rules would spend federal dollars in areas where state, federal, and even private dollars are already at work deploying broadband.
The final rules also encourage funding recipients to prioritize support for broadband networks owned or operated by local governments — a risky and unproven partnership that could put billions of dollars to waste. There are several recent examples of municipally owned or operated broadband networks that have wasted taxpayer dollars and deterred private sector investment in areas where connectivity is greatly needed. In many cases, taxpayers are left paying off these bad investments, and users are left unconnected.
Unfortunately, we have seen this play before. In 2009, the Broadband Technology Opportunity Program squandered hundreds of millions of dollars on overbuilding through its own poor planning and management. One study found that the program had “no positive effect on home broadband adoption.” Another study found that had the federal government adopted a more reasonable framework, “many more households could have been connected for the same money, or the same number of connections could have been realized for a fraction of the cost.” At the root of this failure was a set of poorly informed government rules.
Perhaps the most troubling feature of Treasury’s funding rules is that they allow recipients to rely on any source of data to determine existing broadband coverage, as opposed to requiring standardized data from the Federal Communications Commission. Treasury’s suggested data sources could even include anecdotal reports from community members as well as notoriously unreliable user speed tests.
The Senate Commerce Committee is currently in the middle of a painstaking process with the FCC and National Telecommunications and Information Administration to develop highly detailed and accurate broadband maps. These maps would show where service is available at certain speeds across the country and where it is not. Undermining these efforts with flawed and inaccurate data would simply waste taxpayer resources while continuing to deprive rural and underserved communities of the broadband deployment they need for economic development. This would defeat the very purpose of these American Rescue Plan funds.
We have already learned these lessons the hard way. There is no reason history should have to repeat itself. Yet the Treasury, with its final rules, seems determined to embrace the failures of the past. Hello, Yogi Berra!
Roger Wicker is the senior senator representing Mississippi.
