House Panel Urges FCC to Simplify USF Waiver Applications
Lawmakers hammered the FCC over the costs and burdens that telecom carriers for tribal communities face when seeking waivers to the commission’s USF reforms. The barrage came at a hearing held Friday by the House Subcommittee on Indian and Alaska Native Affairs. Subcommittee Chairman Don Young, R-Alaska, was particularly critical of the commission’s high-cost order, which he said will lead to the eventual demise of the carriers that serve rural and tribal America. The FCC said that they did not agree with Young’s “characterization."
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Communications Daily is required reading for senior executives at top telecom corporations, law firms, lobbying organizations, associations and government agencies (including the FCC). Join them today!
Young offered a creative visual to explain the costs and hurdles of the FCC’s waiver process. He stacked half a dozen waiver packages from telecom providers that towered more than a foot high on the desk in front of him. “These things cost $100,000 or more,” he said. “Under this proposal we have a new system of phones,” he said, holding up two tin cans tied to a string. “Is there some way we can cut out this gobbledygook and make it more simple?"
Geoffrey Blackwell, chief of the FCC Office of Native Affairs, told Young the cost of a waiver application is $8,000 and carriers are not required to hire experts to help them complete the documentation. “My office is an open door,” he said. “Before they start creating such a stack of papers I recommend talking to us.” Currently the FCC has received six waiver applications, one from Alaska, an agency official told us.
But “we have a real difficult situation here with these waivers and requests for approval and the applications that tribes have to make to get a waiver,” said Del. Eni Faleomavaega, D-American Samoa. “To be burdened with this kind of thing is a classic example of where bureaucracy overplays its hand and does not give assistance that these tribes need.” The FCC would not say whether it would consider reducing the costs or hurdles of waivers. “We set out a standard that is consistent with the oversight that any private, responsible entity would give,” an FCC official told us after the hearing. “If there are ways to exercise that oversight and reduce burdens we are obviously open to them.”
Young said he couldn’t understand how giving less USF money to tribal areas better helps tribal carriers address the need for broadband services. Phase one of the USF reform plan will offer $50 million to help extend mobile services to tribal lands as a part of the Mobility Fund, Blackwell told the panel. But Young scoffed at the number, calling it “spit in the bucket” from what the government is able to loan. The Rural Utilities Service (RUS) “has $200 million in broadband loans in Alaska. How will one year of $50 million in tribal infrastructure funds make a dent in Alaska? Let alone Hawaii? … This order falls short.”
Young asked why the reforms were even necessary in the first place: “Who said the system was broke? … The RUS has not lost money. What’s broke about it?” Blackwell said: “We don’t have 10 percent broadband penetration in Indian country.”
Jonathan Adelstein, RUS administrator, said the FCC’s reform of intercarrier compensation and the USF aimed to address legitimate concerns about “waste and unaccountability.” He said RUS has provided loans and grants to eight of the nation’s ten tribally owned regulated telecommunications carriers. “Without USF revenues many RUS loans would not be feasible,” he said.
Rep. Colleen Hanabusa, D-Hawaii, asked Blackwell to explain whether the FCC offers any special considerations to address communities with a critical need for services. Blackwell said the commission offers a 45-day review clock to offer an “individualized, particularized inquiry” for such carriers. But Hanabusa said she had concerns that the FCC could stop the 45-day clock, something which Blackwell said is a possibility. Rep. Ben Ray Luján, D-N.M., agreed: “There has got to be a better way. We can’t let the bureaucracy get in the way of what the ultimate goal is here.”