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Ground Level Blog
Dave Peters

Commerce takes heat over broadband stimulus oversight

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There were two federal departments responsible for awarding $7 billion in stimulus money to extend high-speed Internet access. (Several hundred million is coming to Minnesota.)

One of them, the Department of Commerce, is catching flak in an inspector general's report that suggests it lacks the capacity to provide good oversight of the $4 billion it awarded.

The main problem, according to the inspector general, is that Congress has not authorized money beyond this December to oversee the Commerce projects, even though many of them extend over the next three years. The report notes that a complicating factor is that award recipients run a wide gamut of non-profits, for-profits, local governments, tribes and cooperatives.

The report, which you can read here, says:

This lack of future funding will hinder the agency's efforts to provide effective long-term oversight of grants, as (the National Telecommunications and Information Administration) will not be able to maintain the comprehensive oversight program it developed to monitor (the Broadband Technology Opportunities Program).

Some of Minnesota's Commerce-funded projects aim at broadening computer education, like the $5 million award to the Blandin Foundation. Others are for infrastructure, like a project to extend fiber in Carver County.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture is responsible for more of the broadband money coming to Minnesota, including fiber infrastructure projects in a number of rural communities like Windom, Lac Qui Parle, Cook and Lake counties.

It's not clear to me at this point whether anyone thinks the USDA has similar oversight problems.

The inspector general's report was written about today at Politico, where the story's comments give full vent to the notion that broadband extension to remote areas is a matter left to private enterprise.