Cruz Urges Senate Agriculture Revamp ReConnect Before Adding New Funds
Senate Commerce Committee ranking member Ted Cruz, R-Texas, urged Agriculture Committee leaders Thursday to “consider” making changes to the Agriculture Department's ReConnect program before allocating it “any new funding” as part of the 2023 farm bill. Cruz noted his priority of “rigorous oversight of the massive amounts of federal taxpayer money -- calculated at over $175 billion -- dedicated to broadband over the last five years” via the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and other legislation. Cruz and Communications Subcommittee ranking member John Thune, R-S.D., in recent months repeatedly raised concerns about broadband spending (see 2301260055).
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Biden’s FY 2024 budget request for USDA proposes “$400 million in new funding” for ReConnect, which is “misguided given the unprecedented amount of federal broadband money already available,” including “$2 billion in appropriated funding that ReConnect has not yet spent” and NTIA’s IIJA-funded $42.5 billion broadband, equity, access and deployment program, Cruz said in a letter to Senate Agriculture Chairwoman Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., and ranking member John Boozman, R-Ark., that we obtained. Adding new funding “exacerbates the inefficiencies and coordination challenges that have resulted from multiple federal agencies administering overlapping broadband programs. This risk is especially acute with ReConnect, which lacks necessary guardrails to prevent subsidized overbuilding: Pursuant to the IIJA, ReConnect allows projects to be funded even when 50% of service locations already have broadband.”
ReConnect’s “current evaluation criteria are skewed to favor certain partisan political objectives, distracting from the goal of bringing broadband to rural America,” Cruz said. “For example, USDA’s rules discriminate against non-union labor, and favor projects that are run by municipal governments, commit to net neutrality principles, and share their networks with competitors at wholesale rates. Before giving any new funds to ReConnect, Congress should reform the program or at the very least demand that USDA fix its evaluation criteria, so the selection of projects is based on serving unserved households rather than advancing partisan priorities like net neutrality.”
USDA and Senate Agriculture didn’t comment.
Cruz, Thune and House Communications Subcommittee Chairman Bob Latta, R-Ohio, cited their broadband oversight goals during the Free State Foundation’s Tuesday conference. “Rigorous oversight” of federal broadband programs is needed “to ensure that taxpayer money is being used to” bring service “to truly unserved areas and not simply wasted on subsidized overbuilding,” Cruz said in a prerecorded video. He also plans to hold federal agencies “accountable when they abuse vague statutory provisions to pursue partisan policy goals like broadband rate regulation and government-owned networks.”
“We’ve got to get” FCC and NTIA officials in to testify before House Communications about their broadband spending, Latta told FSF. He also cited concerns about the FCC’s revised broadband coverage map and wants lawmakers to further ease permitting restrictions. Thune told FSF he began his own review in December of all federal broadband programs’ oversight of funding disbursals (see 2212060067) because of the “spider web of bureaucracy” that’s resulted in there being “more than 130 federal broadband programs” across 15 agencies. He wants to “ensure there’s stringent oversight of how these taxpayer funds are being spent.”