Watchdog Report Calls for National Broadband Strategy to Reduce Broadband Fund Inefficiencies

WASHINGTON, June 7, 2022 – The Government Accountability Office has called for the federal government to address the considerable overlap among over 100 different funding programs overseen by 15 separate agencies for broadband builds that it said in a report released last week could cause service “inefficiencies.”

The GAO indicated that the various grant programs had fragmentation, referring to circumstances where more than one agency was involved in the same broad area of need; overlap, occurring when multiple agencies have similar goals; and duplication, when multiple agencies have the same goal and activities.

The report recommends that the National Economic Council develop and implement a national broadband strategy “with clear roles, goals, objectives, and performance measures to support better management of fragmented, overlapping federal broadband programs and synchronize coordination efforts.”

While some fragmentation and overlap is necessary to complement existing programs, said the report, other cases where multiple agencies are involved “can create barriers for program applicants or inefficiencies in service delivery.”

The report highlighted an overall concern that federal programs are a patchwork of grants that is unorganized and ineffective. “Overlap and duplication [can sometimes] occur because of incremental addition of programs over time to respond to new needs and challenges, without a strategy to coordinate efforts and effectively manage them.”

Lags between application and deployment times across different programs also present opportunity for duplication, the report said. The GAO warned that this can negatively affect program outcomes, implementation and cost-effectiveness.

Current efforts

The NEC leads regular broadband coordination meetings with the National Telecommunications and Information Administration that focus on avoiding duplication with other federal agencies. The executive leadership team of the American Broadband Initiative, an interagency working group,  was established to address individual agency actions and serve as an information-sharing venue.

Furthermore, the Infrastructure, Investment and Jobs Act includes a new interagency coordination provision that requires the NTIA to coordinate with other agencies when implementing new programs or mapping efforts. It will be expected to establish program definitions and determine how funds complement other programs.

To that end, the GAO also calls for the NTIA to identify the statutory limitations preventing program alignment.

The GAO report said that “implementation of these requirements is still forthcoming and NTIA is assessing the new coordination requirements.”

The IIJA does not require the NTIA or any other federal agency to develop a national broadband strategy.

Agencies are not unaware of this issue. Many are working to coordinate with other programs to reduce duplication but claim that “some statutory specifics within programs limit the agencies’ ability to more effectively align their programs,” the reports said.

“Some stakeholders,” continued the report, “said it can be challenging to use programs together to boost overall broadband access, often because programs are targeted to specific needs or have certain restrictions.”

The NTIA’s Office of Internet Connectivity and Growth is developing a 2022 internal workplan for interagency coordination but it will “not be a strategy for the office as a whole.” This comes a decade after its outdated 2010 national broadband plan.