In this third annual Federal Broadband Funding report, NTIA analyzed fiscal year 2022 federal broadband funding data from 13 agencies and 70 programs, while also looking ahead to improvements in data collection and economic impact analysis of broadband deployment efforts. To accompany this report, NTIA also launched the first multi-year Federal Broadband Funding Report Dashboard, which hosts all available broadband funding report data from all prior fiscal years of data collected.

NTIA will continue to work to meet the ACCESS BROADBAND Act mandate in the year ahead, focusing work in three major areas.

1.    Promoting Data Collection and Reporting Consistency Across Programs

To capture an accurate picture of federal broadband investments, a consistent approach to data collecting and reporting for all agency programs is needed. As more investments are made in broadband across the country, OICG is coordinating with other broadband funding data collection efforts to collect the data needed for this report.

In May 2023, as directed by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the FCC launched its Broadband Funding Map, which serves as “an online mapping tool to provide a location overview of the geographic footprint of each broadband infrastructure deployment project funded by the Federal Government.”¹⁴ This map provides a snapshot of broadband infrastructure investments by location which supports coordination across investments made by federal agencies NTIA provided input in the map’s development to ensure the map includes data elements that align to this report’s needs and coordinated with other agencies to provide similar input. All federal agencies are required to contribute broadband infrastructure deployment funding data to the FCC.

The timing of the release of the FCC map and the data reported within the map did not align with the FY 2022 data collection for this report. For future reports, OICG is examining ways to use the administrative data collected through the FCC Broadband Funding Map to capture a full geographic picture of broadband infrastructure funding. OICG will continue to assess the extent of new data required from agencies and what other data sources, specifically the Broadband Funding Map and USAspending, could be used to respond to the ACCESS BROADBAND Act congressional mandate.

2.    Using Open Data for Consistency and Transparency

In October 2022, the Office of Management and Budget released Controller Alert CA-23-02, Leveraging Assistance Listings and Financial Assistance Award Descriptions to Help Meet Statutory Broadband Reporting.¹⁵ The purpose of this Controller’s Alert is to minimize agency burden in satisfying the reporting requirements of the ACCESS BROADBAND Act.

Agencies are still implementing the Alert’s guidance to review their Assistance Listings. The potential of open data to inform this report, as presented on USAspending.gov, will be more feasible after agencies incorporate specific language in award documents, including broadband planning, deployment, and/or digital inclusion and adoption. NTIA will continue working cooperatively with federal agencies to find the best ways to leverage data reported in USAspending, the FCC’s Federal Broadband Funding Map, and other resources to maximize the accuracy and consistency of federal broadband funding reporting.

3.    Using New Data Sources to Measure Impact

The ACCESS BROADBAND Act requires NTIA to provide an estimate of the economic impacts of federal broadband deployment efforts. Determining a causal link between broadband expansion and indicators of local economic impact is challenging. NTIA continues to review new research and methods to estimate the economic impact of broadband expansion while making data available to researchers and the public for independent impact analysis. The 2022 Federal Broadband Funding report included the release of a conceptual economic impact framework, as shown earlier in the FY 2021 Federal Broadband Funding Report. With this framework as a guide, NTIA collaborated with the Census Bureau to create the ACCESS BROADBAND Dashboard of economic indicators, an online interactive mapping tool described above. This interactive dashboard allows the public to compare maps displaying broadband access statistics to maps of social and economic indicators. NTIA will continue to explore ways to update the Dashboard of economic indicators to reflect changes in broadband availability, adoption, and economic conditions over time.