National Telecommunications and Information Administration Broadband Program Faces Uncertain Funding and NTIA Needs to Strengthen Its Post-Award Operations

摘要

NTIA has completed both funding rounds of its broadband grant awards. By September 30, 2010, NTIA had made almost $4 billion in awards to over 230 recipients, making BTOP the largest grants program NTIA has ever managed. With the announcement of the last awards, NTIAs focus has shifted to monitoring this diverse portfolio of grants, which were awarded to a wide variety of recipients, including public entities, for-profits, nonprofits, cooperative associations, and tribal entities. While NTIA has been proactive in its establishment of a post-award oversight program, we did find the following causes for concern: 1. NTIA has developed many new processes to assist BTOPs program office and grant recipients with post-award activities, but the program will have no federal funding source after December 3, 2010. This lack of future funding will hinder the agencys efforts to provide effective long-term oversight of grants, as NTIA will not be able to maintain the comprehensive oversight program it developed to monitor BTOP. Reduced monitoring may mean that NTIA will be less able to ensure that the grant projects successfully meet program objectives. NTIA will have to prioritize its future oversight activities carefully so that long-term program monitoring does not suffer. 2. Despite the potential lack of funding, NTIAs post-award monitoring and oversight practices need to be strengthened in several ways. First, some agreements with other Commerce agencies are unclear and have not been carefully managed. In addition, there is a knowledge gap between the staff of the contractor that designed BTOPs soft- ware systems and the NTIA staff who must maintain the systems. NTIA also does not have a robust means for tracking employee training and development. While NTIA has created new manuals and guidance to help employees and grantees understand BTOP, several of the manuals lack important details about policies and procedures. Finally, some aspects of award monitoring are not being completed promptly or efficiently.