Sneak Preview: NTIA Advised To Offer Feedback on TBCP Applications
(The following is excerpted from a recent Thompson Grants Compliance Expert article.) The Department of Commerce (DOC) National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) plans to contact “equitable disbursement” recipients awarded under the initial round of the Tribal Broadband Connectivity Program (TBCP) to discuss ways to improve the recipients' applications for the second round of funding, in response to a recent Government Accountability Office (GAO) report recommendation.
The Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021 (Pub. L. 116-260) and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (Pub. L. 117-58) provided $3 billion in total funding for the TBCP, under which NTIA was to provide grants in two rounds to fund tribal broadband use and adoption projects, and broadband infrastructure deployment. NTIA received more than 300 applications from eligible tribal entities to a June 2021 notice of funding opportunity (NOFO), although not all were funded. As of July 25, NTIA had made 191 grants totaling $1.79 billion of the $1.98 billion it planned to award under its initial NOFO. The agency announced a second TBCP NOFO on July 27 for the remaining funding.
While NTIA’s initial NOFO offered awards generally ranging from $1 million to $50 million for broadband infrastructure deployment projects, and $50,000 to $2.5 million for broadband adoption and use projects, the agency also was required by the act to provide a portion of the funds appropriated under the program available to each eligible tribe on an equitable basis, but it did not define “equitable basis.”
In the first NOFO, NTIA allocated up to $500,000 per tribal government to meet this equitable distribution requirement. Such equitable distribution grants often were only a fraction of the full amount requested by the applicant. As of July, NTIA had awarded 56 equitable distribution grants to applicants, which account for about 30% of the 191 announced TBCP grants, but account for less than 2% of the funds awarded.
However, after surveying a sample of seven TBCP equitable distribution recipients, GAO found that none of the seven reported that NTIA provided constructive feedback on their application despite requesting such feedback. One survey respondent reported that NTIA officials stated that their funding decision was based on funding availability, not the application’s merits or quality, while another said that NTIA officials told them that there were other applicants with greater need.
(The full version of this story has now been made available to all for a limited time here.)
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