We’ve praised government efforts to bring high-speed broadband to poor, rural Americans, but it looks like we may have been too quick with our praise. Turns out that even bureaucrats with the best of intentions can pound your money just as quickly as crooked bureaucrats. According to an investigation by politico.com, the Rural Utilities Service has completely failed in its mission to bring high-speed internet service to millions of needy Americans:
A POLITICO investigation has found that roughly half of the nearly 300 projects RUS approved as part of the 2009 Recovery Act have not yet drawn down the full amounts they were awarded. All RUS-funded infrastructure projects were supposed to have completed construction by the end of June, but the agency has declined to say whether these rural networks have been completed. More than 40 of the projects RUS initially approved never got started at all, raising questions about how RUS screened its applicants and made its decisions in the first place.
But a bigger, more critical deadline looms for those broadband projects still underway: If these networks do not draw all their cash by the end of September, they will have to forfeit what remains. In other words, they may altogether squander as much as $277 million in still-untapped federal funds, which can’t be spent elsewhere in other neglected rural communities.
The Rural Utilities Service (and its predecessors) have been around since the New Deal and has been part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture since 1994. Its raison d’être is to help rural communities improve water, waste treatment, electrical power, and telecommunications. If this latest failure is typical of its accomplishments, the organization is clearly not living up to the mission statement shown on its website:
Utilities programs connect rural residents to the global economy by:
- Increasing access to broadband and 21st century telecommunications services;
- Funding sustainable renewable energy development and conservation;
- Financing reliable and affordable electric systems;
- Working to integrate electric smart grid technologies;
- Developing reliable and affordable rural water and wastewater systems.
These investments support the nation’s long-term prosperity by ensuring that rural communities have the infrastructure to compete in the global economy.
The high-speed internet project was funded as part of the ignominious and inaccurately-named “stimulus” back in 2009. Unfortunately, Politico has discovered that failure is not uncommon to this little-known government agency. An inspector general reported as far back as 2005 that RUS had trouble keeping track of its taxpayer funded funds.
Here’s how Politico reported:
Federal investigators also calculated that RUS had awarded more than $137 million in loans, despite incomplete or inaccurate applications. About $30 million of its loans “[were] in default due to inadequate servicing,” largely because the agency hadn’t developed strong oversight guidelines for its earliest loans — meaning the cash wasn’t “timely and thoroughly monitored.” And another $6.8 million in canceled broadband loans “was not put to use in a timely fashion and was therefore unavailable for future funding.”
As we said, that was back in 2005, long before the global economic crisis turned economics upside down. If RUS couldn’t manage its projects in good times, it should come as no surprise that everything fell apart again when stimulus money was flooding the economy:
Quietly, RUS killed 42 broadband infrastructure projects that it had heralded only months earlier. The agency rescinded more than $300 million in loans and grants before a single check was written. In many cases, local officials had struggled to finance their share of their networks, or obtain the permits needed to lay new fiber cables or erect new wireless towers.
We wish this were a once-in-a-lifetime story. We’d still be happy if it were a twice-in-a-lifetime story. Unfortunately, wasting billions of taxpayer dollars without doing anything to help those who need it most seems to a too common occurrence in our nation’s capital.
Back in 2011 — long before Politico rooted out the details of this Rural Utilities Services scandal, the Washington Post talked to Taxpayers for Common Sense President Ryan Alexander, who condemned government waste in general:
Alexander was specifically talking the Solyndra scandal, but her comments ring true for a lot of programs. The fact is whenever government gets its greedy little fingers into a particular pie it doesn’t want to get them out because it loves the influence. It loves the power and the ability to pick winners and losers. The problem is the winners seem to be those who coddle up to Congress and the losers are the taxpayers.
Rural Utilities Services has been wasting taxpayer dollars for 80 years. To repeat, 80 years. As most government bureaucracies do over time, it’s mutated from an interesting experiment into a bloated basket case of bilious abuse and inexplicable inefficiency.
HotAir gets down to the nub of the issue with these two powerful paragraphs:
Their goal may be considered noble because they (allegedly) want to bring fast Internet to smaller communities, but the question is whether the communities even need the high-speed Internet? Does a farmer who focuses on plowing fields really need 200mbps or can they survive on no Internet at all? Would it be better for them to get satellite service and their spotty Internet or should the bigger ISPs decide to move in there? Or could the farmer make a deal on Internet with the ISP for high-speed Internet if he or she really needed it. Or is it possible for a smaller ISP to be created which could actually serve smaller communities without the need of the government at all?
… The best solution is getting rid of these government permits, stopping the stranglehold some of the big ISPs have on cities and states (i.e. convincing local and state governments to not hand out monopolies) and letting the dreaded unfettered free markets have their way. It would probably save taxpayer money because the government wouldn’t have a stake in it, therefore no taxpayer cash would be spent. It’s just convincing politicians, candidates, and people on the idea that nongovernmental reliance might be the best way to go. That way, no one gets to read ridiculous articles from POLITICO on how the government is truly fracking things up.
As President Ronald Reagan said in his first inaugural address, “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”
Stories like the one about the failure of Rural Utilities Services make us believe that Reagan was right.
TONY MARTIN says
Never finished reading the WHOLE article, but it looks as though you are against the POOR getting high speed internet.. Well, we both know that our GOVT SQUANDERS more money on GARBAGE.. ALSO, WHY are we giving 12 countries OVER 1 MILLION DOLLARS every month? We give money to every Tom/ Dick and Harry that holds their hand our , and your against low income having high speed internet. Mr Writer, please answer my question as to why America is giving 12 countries OVER 1 million dollars each month.If you CANT give an answer , maybe you should write a comment to our govt, asking THEM why, and leave the poor people alone.
CheapInternet.com Administrator says
We always try to be polite to our readers because we know they need our help, but we’re going to make an exception to that rule in your case, Tony. Let us be blunt: You’re a freakin’ moron. You say in your comment “Never finished reading the whole article…” Well, perhaps, you should have, you sub-Neanderthal nincompoop. Had you read beyond the first sentence you would have read this:
“According to an investigation by politico.com, the Rural Utilities Service has completely failed in its mission to bring high-speed internet service to millions of needy Americans…”
How much clearer could we have been? Our complaint is that the government did a lousy job delivering high speed internet to poverty-stricken Americans who desperately need it.
Here’s a suggestion, Tony. Read. The. Whole. Article. You might actually learn something.