GAO Recommends FCC 'Revise' High-Cost USF Performance Goals, Measures
The GAO said Friday it’s recommending the FCC “revise” its performance goals and measures for its high-cost USF program to ensure they're “measurable and quantifiable” to better align “with leading practices.” Doing so will allow the commission to “improve the performance information it uses in its decision-making processes about how to allocate the program’s finite resources,” the GAO said. It found in interviews with stakeholders that the high-cost program’s goals “generally reflect important and appropriate strategic objectives” but don’t meet the standards outlined in the Government Performance and Results Act that they be “objective, quantifiable, and measurable.”
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The goals “contain overlapping language about the availability of voice service without differentiating how, if at all, each goal considers voice services differently,” GAO said. “The lack of performance goals that are quantifiable and measurable might hinder FCC’s ability to demonstrate whether it achieves desired high-cost program outcomes.” The FCC should also revise its measures for the program, including ensuring they “clearly link with performance goals and have specified targets.” The measure for the current goal of “minimizing the universal service contribution burden on consumers and businesses” should take “into account user-fee leading practices, such as equity and sustainability considerations,” the GAO said. It also recommended the FCC “publicly and periodically report” on the program’s performance. The agency now communicates it in “a limited fashion, which may lead to stakeholder uncertainty about the program’s effectiveness.”
FCC Managing Director Mark Stephens and Wireline Bureau Chief Kris Anne Monteith concurred with the recommendations in a letter attached to the GAO’s report. “The performance goals and measures that were adopted almost 10 years ago may not align with GAO’s leading practices or how we evaluate performance today,” so they will recommend the commission “revisit the overarching performance measures as part of ongoing and future proceedings,” the officials said.
House Commerce Committee Chairman Frank Pallone, D-N.J., who requested the GAO study, said the report “validates” his “profound concerns” about how the FCC led by Chairman Ajit Pai was handling USF. GAO found the program "has been woefully maintained, with basic governance structures either wholly missing or outdated, effectively being left to rot under” Pai’s leadership, Pallone said in a statement.
He noted the FCC’s Thursday kickoff of the $16 billion Rural Digital Opportunity Fund Phase 1 auction (see 2010290020), which is happening “without adequate or accurate broadband maps to guide them -- and is doing so over the express objections of” Democratic Commissioners Jessica Rosenworcel and Geoffrey Starks. “It is likely that, as a result, funding will be poorly targeted and wasted, when it could and should be going toward communities in desperate need of connectivity,” Pallone said. “Today’s report confirms that” the Pai-led FCC “failed to be a proper steward of” USF, and future commissions “will be at a serious disadvantage in closing the digital divide as a result.”