Recently, the Rural Utilities Service, one of those alphabetical federal government agencies better known as RUS, issued some proposed new rules to straighten out the operations of their broadband lending program. Congress began this program in 2002 with the admirable goal of bringing broadband to rural areas, which generally have a lesser availability of broadband services because of the expense of building broadband facilities in areas with as few as 3 or 4 people per mile.
But the program didn’t work very well in its first five years — a lot of loans went to areas to provide broadband in places that already had it, and RUS made it harder than necessary to get loan money for areas that didn’t have broadband. After getting a lot of criticism from government watchdogs as well as from Congress, RUS decided to try to remedy the problems with the broadband loan program — through these draft rules which were sent out for public comment.
We took RUS up on their invitation and provided extensive comments to RUS on how the broadband loan program could be improved. We emphasized that RUS should try its hardest to minimize wasteful funding for duplicative broadband service and facilities, and also stressed that RUS itself was throwing up unnecessary barriers to firms that potentially could qualify for financing to bring broadband to rural America. It is important to remember that the RUS program is voluntary — burdensome rules that discourage companies from participating defeat its central purpose of making accessible and affordable broadband service available to every American, particularly those folks living in rural areas.
Rural Americans should not be denied the benefits of broadband service. A well functioning RUS broadband program can be a key component of a suite of government policies that can help the market provide broadband service to rural America. But it has to be efficiently run. Hopefully RUS will carefully consider our comments and improve this important program.
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