BTOP Nuggets
July 21, 2009
My dear friends and fellow taxpayers,
You won’t believe what I am about to tell you. Make sure you are sitting down. It’s about the Beltway again.
Remember all that stimulus money (aka tax dollars/future debt) President Obama is sprinkling across America? Well, $7.2 billion of it is dedicated to the Broadband Technology Opportunity Program (BTOP) with a primary emphasis on making low interest loans and grants available for broadband infrastructure.
Two Federal organizations have processes to distribute the funds. The traditional Department of Agriculture RUS administration serving rural communities (loans) and under the Department of Commerce the NTIA is serving in a matching grant capacity issuance of funds.
Here comes the UNBELIEVABLE part – two nuggets just for you.
The first nugget, the NTIA is responsible for awarding $4.2 billion in funds. That’s “b” as in billion. The NTIA is seeking unpaid but “expert” volunteers to assess grant applications and score them. Just think about this for one second.
If I were a nasty ass ILEC or Cable Company, I would have every “expert” on my payroll apply to volunteer. I would ask every retiree with a pension interest to volunteer. I would have every law firm or consulting firm I have ever done business with encourage to have their experts apply to volunteer. If I were the CWA, I would get expert members or retirees with pension interests to apply as volunteers.
Talk about conflicts of interest…who you may know over what your application says; potential of fraud, competitive bias, potential of grant fixing, the overall integrity of the process and lack of plain old commonsense. This is amazing!!!!
There are no other “volunteers” in any other area of the $700+ billion stimulus funds being distributed. This is ripe for corruption, schemes, collusion – you name it.
The second nugget, after any entity submits a proposal, the proposal will be posted for public review/comment. This is called “transparency”. Within the process of a public review, there is an ability to question a proposal on its merits by a third party. A proposal may be declined based upon what this third party states or alleges. By the way, if you submit a proposal and are challenged by a third party; you have no due process rights if this happens. The NTIA will not even disclose to you who questioned what or what they alleged. If this isn’t Communism, what is it?
If I were a nasty ass ILEC or Cable Company–any municipality proposing anything–I would be submitting a challenge. If I were a nasty ass ILEC, Cable Company, Wireless Carrier, ISP or CLEC (and for pure self-serving competitive reasons) and saw a proposal that gives me competitive heartburn, I would be submitting a challenge. One would think any and all “challenges” would be transparent and open for public scrutiny as well.
I thought we recently elected transparency.
Pretty nuts, huh!!
Written by Dave Rusin - Telecom Executive
Posted by wbrache | Filed Under American telecom, Fiber bandwidth, Infrastructure and Bandwidth, Telecom Blogs, Telecom USA, Telecom bloggers, Telecom broadband, Telecom expense management, Telecom news, Telecommunications blogs, Telecommunications industry
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