FCC Commissioner Carr Calls for National Broadband Strategy

For over a year, I have been sounding the alarm on the troubling lack of oversight and coordination when it comes to the federal government’s expenditure of hundreds of billions of dollars that Congress appropriated for ending the digital divide. I have written letters to federal agencies charged with administering those funds to seek assurances that taxpayer dollars are not wasted, and in several cases those letters received no response at all. I have testified about the worrying lack of coordination across federal agencies and their respective programs. I have spoken out about the absence of adequate tracking, measurement, and accountability standards. And I have noted that the Administration’s approach to spending. This troubling new [Government Accountability Office] report only underscores those concerns. The GAO finds that the Administration lacks a national strategy to guide the federal government’s broadband efforts, which the GAO determined are now fragmented over 133 different programs and spread across 15 separate agencies.