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FCC Internet Grant Decision Riles Congress
museumpeace writes "The FCC, with no advance notice to congress, effectively made substantial cuts in the funding for the program that subsidizes provision of internet connection to libraries and poorer school systems. This was not small potatoes: 2.5 billion buys a lot of connection. [confess your real identity to them and the ]
NYTimes will tell you all about the uproar. The ostensible cause according to FCC officials, who annoyed congressfolk by dodging the inquiry, was an attemp to control possible fraudulent spending in the program but FCC actions then went far beyond fiscal oversight. FCC deference to phone companies by way of reducing the amount they were required to contribute to the program has compounded its financial woes according to Technology Review which also covered the story. [and which will also require a "free" registration]"
I remember hearing about how this program was providing funds to school districts that really didn't know what things cost. I think it was the El Paso school district that wound up being sold a few $million worth of Cisco gear that was never installed because it wasn't part of the IS architecture plans, drawn by the same people that sold the gear.
All in all, this is a program that should have started really big to make initial investments in hardware, but cut back a little to just maintain.
Bacardi + slashdot = negative karma.
IIIRC, a few months ago, Microsoft got to pay their fine in computer and software equipment for the above mentioned educational structures, now, if these get their technological fundings cut, then it means that Microsoft might have to pay in cash.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
So it's okay for the FCC to create a new tax without congressional oversight, but if they ever decide to get rid of that same tax, there's an uproar?
I actually worked on an E-rate project in a large urban area. Graft and corruption do not begin to describe the money sucking machine that was E-rate. So I speak with some authority on the subject when I say that we are all better off without it.
Now 3.5 billion is a nice slush fund.
For 3.5 billion you could give 29 million students dialup for a year and they don't have to share.
Or 1.1 million schools could have a dedicated high speed cable connection with static IPs and no bandwidth cap year round.
If either of the above was actually done with the money it was well spent. But I don't think it was.
The executive agencies have a responsibility to cut off public funds when they have a very good reason to believe they are being subject to fraud, waste and abuse. GSA, the General Services Administration, does this sort of thing all the time when it does internal criminal audits of how Congressionally-allocated funds are being used. One of their jobs is to bust up slush funds and take down those who were using them. Do you honestly think they let someone just spend all of those tax dollars all the way through the investigation?
The Congress desparately needs to have its spending and law-making powers curtailed by a few good constitutional amendments. The President needs the power of line-item veto, the Congress needs to have every bill address only one subject with all riders to the contrary automatically ruled unenforceable and deficit spending when the Congress has not issued a formal declaration of war should be unconstitutional.
I applaud the FCC, it's about damn time that an executive agency told Congress to take responsibility for where it spends tax dollars. The Congress spends our money, which it confiscates by threat of prison time, like a bunch of rich old white businessmen at a Vegas strip club. As long as the FCC just keeps the funds tied up, it shouldn't have any legal trouble. Since it is saying that it is merely tying up the funds to prevent them from going to what evidence shows is most likely an illegal use, it doesn't have to ask the Congress for permission. The Constitution doesn't say that the executive agencies have to actually spend money for purposes known to be illegal under federal law....
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
The plus side to this mess is that the FCC is going to so thoroughly piss off Congress that it could mean good things in terms of the Broadcast Flag and the EFF's argument that the FCC is overstepping its Congressionally-granted bounds in that matter. This certainly isn't the first case where Michael Powell found himself at odds with Congress.
When there is proper oversight. For the last 5 years I have been directly involved in wonderful education projects that would not be possible without E-Rate funding. Many, many schools in the state where I live would not even have Internet access were it not for E-Rate funds and most would be stuck at ISDN speeds for hundreds of students per school. I have seen first hand the power of distance learning in cooperation with Universities, use of web resources for students such as Atomic Learning and NetTrekker, online teacher recertification training to be compliant with NCLB, and the ability for districts and states to modernize a significant portion of their daily administrative tasks such as attendance reporting, Free and Reduced Lunch tracking and centralized student information systems by bringing them all online. The savings in administration overhead are significant by themselves. All of this is possible because of E-Rate.
What people don't seem to realize is that most school districts are poor. They have very restricted budgets with little lee-way. E-Rate allows them to bring modern technology into the hands of students who most likely don't get to utilize it at home and educational resources that they most certainly wouldn't be able to use or even access at home.
A properly managed E-Rate fund with proper accounting and oversight is essential to the education of our future. The sensationalist examples of waste given in response to this article are exceptions and not the general rule. NASA had the same types of problems years ago. NASA wasn't abolished or suspended. Instead, they were forced to get their act together and perform proper accounting and oversight. That's the right way and what needs to happen here.
Omeganon
Personally, I do not see much reason for the local library to have Internet connectivity for visitors. I always went to the library to get books and media, not sit there and type on some nasty public keyboard.
While I understand there are some unfortunate souls out there who can not afford a computer and 'net connect, I do not see why I am in charge of providing them both.
I might be missing something major here; Feel free to jump in and tell me if I did. The way I see it, I'd rather that money be spent on the library's inventory.
From what I can tell from the articles, your money is going to pay off debt that the FCC has generated because of corrupt business practices.
Cheers.
~D
This sig has been enciphered with a one-time pad. It could say almost anything.
I don't see how allowing things to continue as they were was a good idea.
You know the expression "throwing the baby out with the bathwater"? Arbitrarily shutting the program down without notification, under the intent of stopping abuse (at the expense of a majority of programs that are not part of the abuse) is a great way to get new FCC commissioners.
I have E-Rate customers (mostly school districts). Last year, several had their paperwork rejected (clerical errors by the district staff rejected by E-Rate and the E-Rate administrators would not permit a "re-application" to correct the minor errors). We carried them at a loss of over $20K per district. We made sure to update our paperwork to prevent against having to carry the loss in the future - whether or not your mom and dad give you $10 to help buy lunch is not McDonald's responsibility.
Guess what? Several districts are now faced with being shut off. No Internet. They don't have the budget to make up the E-Rate difference - heck, they already had to reduce several teaching positions in several districts. They looked at us to absorb it again, but after $80K missing from last year on a customer who at their current rate is 60% of what I make on the same business broadband (and they use every bit of bandwidth I give them). Per the corruption issues, a subsidy for broadband provided at less than my cost is far from an issue (though I am aware of some incumbant LECs that have abused it). Want to shut down a corrupt broadband program? RUS grants and low interest loans - mostly used as ILEC political reward money. Many of the grants in our region are given to totally inept, unqualified but politically influencial incumbant phone monopolies. Oh well, it's just your tax money being given back to keep your phone company in position to monopolize the network for another 50 years.
So I would imagine the FCC's effect will be causing an Internet blackout for schools and libraries. Senators are already getting called by administrators, and Senators should have no problem removing a rather corrupt FCC (mind you, I'm of the same political party as the President, a licensed amateur radio operator, own commercial licenses and am highly disgusted with this cash & carry FCC).
Federal funding is not going to help poorly performing inner city schools. They are the way they are not due to lack of funding, but due to lack of interest by staff and parents. Since nobody holds them accountable, things never get better. Give them more money, they'll just find a way to embezzle it into new cars for administrators while the classrooms still have leaky roofs.
And the single best way I the FCC is to investigate the hell out of Michael Powell and his cronies to find out who is in their pockets.
I think that the shady dealings of the FCC merit a special prosecutor, and have for some years.
In space, no one can hear you moo.
Exactly. I don't mind (indirectly) subsidizing phone service in other areas, or in schools. But I wish phone companies would be forced to advertise the REAL price of the service, not the "price before twenty-three surcharges". If you were running a store, you would be expected to stick to your advertised prices.
Of course, there is still the problem that we end up paying taxes in too many places. They really ought to consolidate these taxes into one place, probably income tax. Get rid of phone taxes, gas taxes, sales taxes, and just use one tax where it's easy to figure out how much of your salary goes to the government. I'm not against paying the money, but it's deceitful to hide the true cost the way it is now.
The Bush administration consistantly acts without regard to the Justice Department or Congress. It is supposed to administer laws, not write its own. He's managing to even piss off his OWN party. Jerry Falwell on the news the other day was talking about how "the neo-conservatives have taken over the White House and are 'nation building' in Iraq" contrary to his campaign pledge and the desires of Falwell's wing of the Republican Party.
As a former Director of Technology for a school district in Missouri, I had to deal very closely with the e-rate system. In concept, e-rate/universal service fund was supposed to level the playing field for poor districts whose tax base could not support the kind of technology enhancements that would allow students in those districts to compete with those in districts with a higher tax base that could afford the services if they wanted it.
The problem as I see it is the Administrators don't know when they are being taken for a ride by the "consulting companies" that they bring in to do the work. I was one of the few administrators who was a technology professional to begin with. Most districts I had contact with just add the technology planning and administration to the duties of a Math, Science, or Business teacher. They don't traditionally have the information technology background to form a plan of attack for the district to follow, and instead just let the "consultants" tell them what to do. That gives the consultants the needed loophole to overcharge and under-deliver.
Free internet access available in our public schools and libraries strengthens the association in the publics' mind between first ammendment rights and internet publication and access rights.
i ndex.html.
. pdf
The problem is that alternative news sources don't respect the "talking points" and propaganda that are so essential to the so-called "war on terror". How can the owners of our socitety herd us in the direction they believe we need to go when there is a grass-roots movement on the internet to poke holes in the false rationals we're being given?
For this reason I believe the near future we will see efforts to make it more difficult to access or publish alternative news on the internet, especially if Bush is re-elected.
Just take a look at what the mainstream news media didn't bother to tell you last year: http://www.projectcensored.org/publications/2004/
Alternative news sources on the internet were all over these stories. For example take a look at what Michael Ruppert (editor of an internet news site) had to say on the subject of Project Censored's #1 censored story of 2004: http://www.fromthewilderness.com/PDF/Commonwealth
Its the most imporant 50 pages you will read all year, but the mainstream news media has ignored it.
> Better yet, let's close down everything that is not explicitly covered
> by the Constitution.
Preach it brother! Can we get an Amen on that?
And I'll add in a great big Hell Yea for good measure.
Especially in the case of the SLC. The FCC had no business ever getting into that business in the first place and it has only caused problems since its inception. We wouldn't be fighting off the CIPA & COPA censors if it were not for those "federal monies" (read cash ripped screaming from end users by way of the telcos) introduced into the state and local schools and public libraries.
And you are exactly on target with where to attack this problem, and that is at the root. Doesn't matter whether the program is effective, whether you think it is a good idea or what. It isn't constituitional, like most of the current Federal government.
Democrat delenda est