FCC Rolls Over Additional $900 Million USF Funds for Schools/Libraries

This morning I saw this story on gobs of extra USF money and thought, "Wow! Nearly $1 trillion extra for schools and libraries: that goes a long way in making up the $1.75 billion shortfall!" But it looks like that "b" should have been an "m" and the real story is more along the lines of "FCC rolls over $900 million for schools and libraries, which should fund about 80% of Priority 2 E-rate requests, just like last year."

It took some digging online to find the real story [see p. 44 of the PDF] (note the suspicious lack of links in the BroadbandBreakfast story), but for a while I held out hope that the lack of news on the FCC USF page, the USAC news page, and other media outlets was based on the fact that no agency wanted to fess up to that scale of accounting sloppiness. In any case, $900 million in misjudged administrative costs is nothing to scoff at. At least it gives me hope that the money is there, somewhere, to continue to fix America's broadband problems with USF support.