In January 2023, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) publicly released a report which makes nine recommendations to assist the Federal Communications Commission  enhance the Affordable Connectivity Program’s (ACP) performance goals and measures, language translation process, consumer outreach plan, and various processes for managing fraud risk. The FCC  has undertaken an aggressive and robust corrective plan to address and resolve each of GAO’s nine recommendations. In less than six months since the Report’s release, corrective action tasks addressing five recommendations have been implemented, and FCC  staff continue efforts to obtain close-out approval from GAO on each. Actions completed include development of new policies and procedures on fraud risk management, development of an anti-fraud strategy aligned with GAO’s best practices, establishment of a governance body for fraud risk management, and strengthened internal controls to prevent ACP duplicate identification and prevention, subscriber identity verification, and subscriber address validation. Ongoing efforts continue to resolve GAO’s recommendation  to ensure that ACP performance goals and measures align with key attributes of effective performance goals and measures, which include surveys, metrics, and outreach efforts to track ACP progress in reducing the digital divide, increasing program participation, and measure application difficulty. In addition, a multi-faceted translation plan designed to promote the ACP in 12 languages is underway. Innovative outreach efforts continue to make progress in educating consumers about ACP that aligns with leading practices for consumer outreach planning. Finally, analytic efforts continue to progress with the objective of improving the ACP’s fraud risk management design.

A group known as the Coalition of Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) Winners is still hoping that the Federal Communications Commission will release additional funding to the companies to help cover the large increases in deployment costs that the winners have experienced since the RDOF rural broadband funding auction was completed in 2020, just prior to the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in the US. One of the companies seeking extra funding is Aristotle Broadband, which won $62 million in the auction for deployments primarily in Arkansas and Mississippi, including persistent poverty counties. Although RDOF winning bidders were announced in 2020, the FCC did not authorize some winners until 2022. In Aristotle’s case, authorization came 18 months after the winning bidders were announced, said Aristotle Broadband CEO Elizabeth Bowles. By that time, Bowles said, the pandemic had hit and “inflation was out of control.” According to Bowles, we have gone from “where RDOF covered 40 to 45% of build costs to now covering 20 to 25% of the cost.” The Coalition of RDOF Winners argues that the FCC should be able to make additional funding available for RDOF winners the commission has only approved a small portion of the $20.4 billion that was budgeted for the RDOF program.

The Tennessee Economic and Community Development Office (TNECD) will begin accepting applications for $60 million in Capital Projects Fund (CPF) dollars for rural broadband deployments in September 2023. But not every county will be eligible for funding. “We wanted to look at counties that historically had very few applications for grant programs," Tennessee State Broadband Director Taylre Beaty said. “It was an effort to set up a targeted program where we really incentivized providers to come to the table in those areas.” TNECD selected three counties for the program, which has a $60 million budget. The counties are Polk, Hardin and Wayne. All three had few if any, applications in previous funding programs. Beaty noted that some other states have used this targeted approach successfully in the past.