It's Official: NTIA Throwing States Under The BTOP Bus

[Commentary] The San Francisco Business Times report, "California technology officials are scrambling to rank 178 applications for broadband stimulus money that have been submitted to the federal government by businesses, nonprofits and government agencies statewide." Daily understands why the National Telecommunications & Information Administration has shared the applications with states: the NTIA set deadlines for getting feedback from the states and it wants to give the states as much time as possible to review the applications and make recommendations. But if NTIA truly didn't conduct any initial filtering before passing the applications through then they've created a lot more work for the states by forcing them to review everything, which means they'll be wasting time considering those applications that have no chance of making it to the next round of consideration. And if NTIA wanted states to be able to make the best possible recommendations, then why not wait until they're able to see the scores from the initial round of reviews?