CONGRESS SHOULD FINISH & PAY FOR RIP & REPLACE 
By Michael O’Rielly 
  

The U.S. Government has emphatically declared, via various actions and enacted legislation, that certain foreign government involvement in the American homeland can pose substantial dangers to our nation and its citizens.  Indeed, these exact findings have been applied to the U.S. communications sector.  Accordingly, Congress and the current Administration have taken monumental steps in recent years to expel certain companies from offering service in the U.S. and mandated that troubling equipment, mostly from China, be removed from U.S. commercial communications networks.  Despite this bold activity, Congress hasn’t matched its policy outrage and mandates with the necessary funding to actually execute its directives.  People should know that over 60 percent of the network costs to implement what’s best known as “Rip & Replace” is still unfunded and our overall networks are still vulnerable.  While I provided greater deference to Congress in the past on this issue, speed is of the essence.  Congress needs to honor its commitments and provide eligible wireless providers with the outstanding billions in relief after years of being informed of this deficiency.   

 

The potential and actual abuse of U.S. communications networks can cause immeasurable harm.  With improper access, bad actors could disrupt, stop, and/or manipulate communications between and among Americans.  An inability to trust or rely on the content of such communications would wreak havoc on everyday commerce and personal lives.  Moreover, the collection of sensitive communications on a select set of Americans (or alternatively everyone) could help build individual dossiers for future exploits.  Equally troubling, foreign despot regimes could attempt to use affected wireless communication networks not only as entry points, but to spread its nefarious propaganda of Anti-American messages.  Worse yet, compromised equipment could be used as mechanism to stymie or intercept important communications from U.S. military and intelligence units.  To be clear, these are not my made-up reasons for removing questionable equipment from our communications system, but the very ones Congress used in the first place to enact the Rip & Replace program.  And nothing in the four years since its enactment has lessened these concerns. 

 

As a former congressional staffer, I am acutely aware of instances when Congress has promised something and then missed important deadlines.  In some respects, it’s become a new Washington hobby: let a deadline pass and then try to put the pieces back together with as little damage as possible.  Rarer is the case, thankfully, in which Congress has mandated obligations on the private sector with promises to pay for reasonable costs and then did not deliver.  Perhaps the act of short-changing the first tranche of $1.9 billion in funding on the front end was a way to ensure that overall Rip and Replace costs would not get out of control.  Communications practitioners may remember a similar time when consumer set top box coupons for the DTV conversion ran out of funds, thereby requiring Congress to allocate targeted resources to meet the program’s real needs.  With Rip & Replace, everyone now knows the true costs, as certified by the Federal Communications Commission, and the undeniable shortfall stands at $3.08 billion.  And making a challenging situation worse, all participants are on the clock following deadlines last July, leaving less than a year to complete the removal and replacement of this equipment.  That’s an impossible task given the funding shortfall.  Unless Congress acts soon, the program will fail, forcing carriers to “rip” but not “replace” and eliminate wireless service in areas where it’s incredibly important.      

 

The semi-good news is that congressional leaders in both parties seem to recognize the need to fix this situation.  Members point to various legislative vehicles that could be used to carry the needed Rip & Replace funding.  Some want to use the annual appropriations process and others see options with legislation to extend spectrum auction authority, an upcoming congressional supplemental appropriations, or as part of an extension of the Affordable Connectivity Program.  Yet, none of these efforts seems likely to finish in the near term for a multitude of reasons.    

 

This leaves eligible wireless providers in a very precarious position.  Many of these companies are smaller in size and cover more rural and remote terrain.  In our hyper-inflation economy, finances are tighter, preventing wireless operators from bankrolling the costs of removing untrusted equipment or purchasing from trusted vendors on the promise that Congress will act someday.  These companies want to upgrade their networks to remove any stigma of subpar quality as well as modernize for advanced 5G and eventually 6G.     

 

The Rip & Replace program, as required by law, is about plugging a defined weakness in our nation’s communications networks.  Consequently, Congress has the obligation to move away from promising to fully compensate eligible providers and actually accomplishing it by including the requisite funding on the first moving legislative train, such as a stopgap Continuing Resolution.  Anything less puts Americans at unnecessary risk.    

 

USDA Broadband Programs May Be Heading Off the Rails 

Posted to Technology August 31, 2023 by Michael O’Rielly 

The House and Senate agriculture committees are taking a fresh look at broadband programs as they work to rewrite the Farm Bill.  Alarmingly, several ideas would significantly weaken the fiscal guardrails that steer rural broadband dollars to the remote, unserved communities where they’re most urgently needed. 

Budget hawks — especially those in House and Senate leadership — must be vigilant against efforts to misuse the Farm Bill to push a bad broadband policy that promotes inefficiency and wastes taxpayer funding. 

There is near unanimity from policymakers at all levels that every American family ought to have access to broadband service. The vast majority of the 8.6 million households without broadband available (according to the FCC’s latest data) are in rural America. Far from being neglected populations, enormous efforts are being made to address the fundamental economics and entice the private sector to serve sparsely populated communities that are often topographically challenged.   

It’s why multiple federal programs are precisely targeting these issues, complemented by Congress committing more than $165 billion in direct funding for broadband plus hundreds of billions more in flexible funding that can be used for broadband to bring service to these areas. 

The agriculture committees are trying to determine how and under what conditions USDA’s rural broadband program, known as ReConnect, should continue funding broadband deployment. Surprisingly, recent hearings and bills have displayed a desire to ignore specific broadband lessons learned over the years. Of all the bills under consideration by Congress, only the Rural Internet Improvement Act of 2023 applies the proper lessons to improve and strengthen the ReConnect program. 

For instance, it is universally accepted that the primary focus of broadband subsidies should be on bringing service to the unserved.  Yet, multiple bills introduced in the Agriculture Committee, including the Reconnecting Rural America Act, would allow grantees to use a significant percent of scarce funding to overbuild served territories — ensuring that the hardest-to-wire communities would thus fall further down the priority list. 

In other words, taxpayer dollars would be spent building a network in a community with two, three, four or more existing broadband providers, while other communities with no access are still waiting. Unserved farmers, ranchers and residents of rural America without service should be swinging their proverbial pitchforks at efforts that inevitably delay service to their families and lands. 

Additionally, almost all recent hearing witnesses — even those generously awarded prior funding — critiqued the Agriculture Department’s ReConnect application process for being too complicated, subjective and unnecessarily bureaucratic. And yet, most of the bills introduced in this Congress to codify ReConnect fail to put forward any reforms to the underlying program. 

However, the bigger problem with ReConnect, is that applicants aren’t competing on a level playing field. The Agriculture Department’s rules stack the deck in favor of electric and telephone co-operatives, while broadband providers with a proven track record of success are being precluded from funding.  Secretary Tom Vilsack even testified mistakenly — at three congressional hearings — that ReConnect was intended to increase speeds of electric and telephone co-op customers — even though the underlying statute provides no advantage to co-ops over other providers and focuses the department on funding areas that are 90 percent unserved. 

While there has been a historic relationship between co-ops and the department, all qualified broadband providers should have an equal chance to win ReConnect funds.  Shrinking the pool of eligible recipients to a subset of providers means that taxpayers pay more for deployment without benefitting from competing applicants — lower consumer costs, better services, more features and functions, and the like. Why would Congress allow this deficiency to be codified, as some have proposed? 

The Farm Bill rewrite is our best opportunity to improve parts of the ReConnect program that prevent some parts of rural America from gaining access.  Ensuring the funding goes to unserved rural areas, improving the application process, and correcting eligibility to encourage broad participation should be priorities for anyone in Congress who believes in spending federal funding wisely and getting broadband to unserved Americans. 

About the Author 

 

Michael O’Rielly 

Michael O’Rielly served as a commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission from 2013 to 2020. He wrote this for InsideSources.com.