Your Tax Money Lies Over the Ocean

Members of Congress often talk a good game about being guardians of taxpayer dollars.  Unfortunately, many politicians don’t follow their words with action.  In a rare, but welcomed development, four members of Congress sent a letter to Federal Communication Commission (FCC) Chairman Julius Genachowski and Assistant Secretary for Communications and Information Lawrence Strickling earlier this week about $1 million of taxpayer dollars spent as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (aka stimulus) for broadband deployment.  In the letter, Reps. Fred Upton (R-Mich.), Greg Walden (R-Oregon), Lee Terry (R-Neb.), and John Shimkus (R-Ill.) explained that,  “We are troubled by reports that the FCC and NTIA spent more than $1 million in taxpayer ‘stimulus’ dollars on broadband speed tests that produced no American jobs and merely reaffirmed what we already knew: the billions in private capital that broadband providers have invested to reach 95 percent of the country is delivering rapidly accelerating service.  Now the FCC plans to expand this speed-test program to mobile broadband services.”  This issue, like all the other stimulus boondoggles, is that the “stimulus” failed to create jobs, but succeeded in wasting taxpayer dollars.

What makes this example of stimulus waste even more egregious than most is that taxpayer money went to SamKnows, a U.K. company, which according to Recovery.gov created no jobs.  In their letter, the four members of Congress posed exactly the right question:  “What was the rational for sending Americans’ hard earned money overseas for a project that didn’t put any Americans to work, especially in the current fiscal climate.”

As the members of Congress noted in their letter:  Internet speed info is “already available from a number of sources without expenditure of additional taxpayer dollars.”  This shows taxpayers that the FCC, like other agencies, is less interested in using taxpayer money to do something useful and instead more concerned with just spending money on anything just because the money is there.  This is a similar attitude the city of Manitowoc took when it received stimulus funds for a new bus station (read previous blog posting here).  The FCC is further proving this point by as The Hill recently reported, “ The FCC now plans to begin measuring the speeds of cellphone service providers,” suggesting that the FCC is looking for more unnecessary ways to spend money.  According to The Hill, the congressional letter also correctly identified the potential result of this endeavor by the FCC, “The Republican lawmakers said the mobile speed study is ‘likely to be even less meaningful in light of technical challenges.’”

Giving tax dollars to a foreign company when the money was supposed to be used to create jobs at home is galling and counter-productive.  A little commonsense would go a long way.  There is no need to spend time figuring out how to redo studies others have done.  A better option is to give taxpayers their money back and put a lid on superfluous spending in the future.