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The Federal Communications Commission is requesting a budget of $359,299,000 to carry out the FCC’s functions and meet the expectations of Congress.
The FCC’s FY 2014 budget submission includes requests for funding to: (1) support Commissionwide information technology needs through extending the enterprise storage; (2) support for reform of the Universal Service Fund Support Program; (3) space consolidation and facilities improvement that will reduce lease arrangements that are not cost effective and improve efficiencies; (4) create a Do-Not-Call registry for telephone numbers used by Public Safety Answering Points (PSAPs); (5) provide resources for mission-critical systems to ensure that they are operational during a Continuity of Operations (COOP) event; and (6) provide contract funding to support mandatory audits for the Office of the Inspector General.
In furtherance of these objectives and the FCC’s mission, the FY 2014 budget request will be used to support the following Strategic Goals:
- Strategic Goal 1: Connect America: Maximize Americans’ access to – and the adoption of—affordable fixed and mobile broadband where they live, work, and travel.
- Strategic Goal 2: Maximize Benefits of Spectrum: Maximize the overall benefits of spectrum for the United States.
- Strategic Goal 3: Protect and Empower Consumers: Empower consumers by ensuring that they have the tools and information they need to make informed choices; protect consumers from harm in the communications market.
- Strategic Goal 4: Promote Innovation, Investment, and America’s Global Competitiveness: Promote innovation in a manner that improves the nation’s ability to compete in the global economy, creating a virtuous circle that results in more investment and in turn enables additional innovation.
- Strategic Goal 5: Promote Competition: Ensure a competitive market for communications and media services to foster innovation, investment, and job creation and to ensure consumers have meaningful choice in affordable
- services.
- Strategic Goal 6: Public Safety and Homeland Security: Promote the availability of reliable, interoperable, redundant, rapidly restorable critical communications infrastructures that are supportive of all required services.
- Strategic Goal 7: Advance Key National Purposes: Through international and national interagency efforts, advance the use of broadband for key national purposes.
- Strategic Goal 8: Operational Excellence: Make the FCC a model for excellence in government by effectively managing the Commission’s human, information, and financial resources; by making decisions based on sound data and analyses; and by maintaining a commitment to transparent and responsive processes that encourage public involvement and best serve the public interest.
FCC’s Fiscal Year 2014 Budget Estimates Submitted to Congress
Deputy Secretary of Commerce Rebecca Blank today released the Department of Commerce’s fiscal year 2014 budget request, which supports President Obama’s plan for an economy built to last with crucial investments in advanced manufacturing, innovation, trade promotion and enforcement, and research and development. These investments are designed to help grow the economy, create jobs and strengthen the middle class. The $8.6 billion budget request is an increase of $1 billion over the fiscal year 2012 level. The Department also identified a total of $195 million in administrative savings.
The FY 2014 Department of Commerce budget includes key investments in the following areas:
- Spurring U.S. Innovation: The budget provides full spending authority for the $3.1 billion the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) expects to receive in fees in FY14. This will support the protection of intellectual property that is crucial to innovation and economic growth. The budget also includes $141 million to support NIST laboratories’ work in advanced manufacturing and materials science.
- Protecting the Nation’s cyber infrastructure: An increase of $15 million to enable NIST to strengthen its core cybersecurity research and development programs, which help protect our nation’s infrastructure and economy from growing threats.
- Informing the Nation: $154.2 million increase to the U.S. Census Bureau to fund research and testing to improve the design and administration of the 2020 Census and $4 million for the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) to improve overall coverage and measurement of Foreign Direct Investment, which will improve the ability of communities to plan for new inbound investment.
- Enhancing public safety: $2 billion for NOAA’s satellites systems, which are critical to its ability to provide accurate weather forecasts and warnings that help protect lives and property.
- Increasing wireless access: $52 million to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) to improve telecommunications performance, optimize Federal agencies’ use of spectrum for radars and satellites, and increase broadband access to communities nationwide.
Deputy Secretary of Commerce Rebecca Blank Announces Fiscal Year 2014 Budget Request
President Barack Obama proposed increased spending to protect U.S. computer networks from Internet-based attacks in a sign that the government aims to put more resources into the emerging global cyber arms race. Obama's budget proposal for the 2014 fiscal year, which begins October 1, calls for more military "hackers" to head off escalating cyber threats from China, Iran, Russia and other countries. It would also bolster defenses for government and private-sector computer networks.
Obama's budget proposes to boost Defense Department spending on cyber efforts to $4.7 billion, $800 million more than current levels, even as it plans to cut the Pentagon's overall spending by $3.9 billion. The Pentagon said it plans to expand its Cyber Command, a team of military hackers conducting what it calls "reconnaissance, surveillance, development, maintenance and analysis." The Pentagon also said it would expand efforts to protect its own computer networks. Under the budget proposal, the Department of Homeland Security would spend $44 million more on a government-wide information-sharing effort even as its overall budget would shrink by $615 million, or 1.5 percent. The department also would fund more cybersecurity research and help private businesses and local governments bolster their online defenses.
Budget makes cybersecurity a growing U.S. priority Pentagon Budget (Government Executive)
President Barack Obama proposed to clear the way for the Federal Communications Commission to require broadcast television station licensees to pay fees for the use of their channels. The spectrum fee proposal, included in the President’s proposed federal budget for fiscal 2014, also would allow the FCC to hit other agency licensees besides broadcasters -- basically any licensee who received spectrum without having to pay for it in an auction -- with the new user fees. The budget also says that the new fees, which would have to be approved by law before the agency could put them in place, could raise $4.8 billion for the federal government through 2023.
Budget Includes Spectrum Fees White House Proposes Spectrum User Fees...Again (B&C)
President Obama submitted his Fiscal Year (FY) 2014 budget to Congress, requesting full funding of $445 million for CPB’s FY 2016 advance appropriation.
On behalf of the millions Americans who utilize public service media, CPB would like to thank the President for the funding he proposes in his budget, as well as for his support of the two-year advance, which serves as an important firewall ensuring editorial independence in programming decisions. The federal appropriation provides essential support for the production of local and national content, making it possible for public radio and television stations across the country, locally owned and operated, to serve their communities with content that educates, informs, inspires and entertains. The President’s request reinforces the value of public media’s in-depth news reporting, our commitment to providing a safe place where children can learn, on-air, online, and in the community, and our commitment to lifelong learning through initiatives such as American Graduate helping to keep America’s young people on the path to a high school diploma. The request also recognizes the unique and powerful role that free, non-commercial, public media serves for listeners and viewers. We appreciate the President’s support. His request reaffirms that federal funding for public media is a vital investment – one that continues to deliver proven value and service to our country.
Patricia Harrison, CEO of CPB, Responds to President Obama's FY 2014 Budget Request
The Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) released its FY 2014 budget request to help U.S. international media meet its strategic priorities in light of dynamic global media environments and current spending constraints. For FY 2014, the BBG has requested $731 million for U.S. international media. The request contains proposed investments designed to increase the impact and reach of U.S. international broadcasting with $13.9 million primarily to support critical initiatives to counter violent extremism.
The investments as a whole would:
- Create a multi-channel, multi-language information and engagement initiative targeting youth in the Trans-Sahel region of Africa.
- Provide deeper, on-the ground coverage in the critical Maghreb region – the birthplace of the Arab Spring.
- Engage new audiences in Burma by investing in the creation and distribution of compelling content for distribution over TV satellite, local affiliates, mobile, and other digital platforms.
- Realign transmission assets and upgrade other infrastructure to improve service to critical audiences and to reduce reliance on external leases.
- The request also contains $12.5 million in Internet anti-censorship funding to continue a broad-based approach to the deployment of emerging technologies and partnerships with cutting-edge experts, developers and in-country networks.
BBG Budget Request Reflects Strategic Priorities And Global Media Environment
President Obama’s fiscal 2014 budget hikes information technology spending slightly to $82 billion, a 2 percent increase from estimated fiscal 2012 levels.
Much of that increase comes from a 22 percent jump in proposed IT spending at the Veterans Affairs Department, focused mainly on reducing VA’s disability claims backlog and improving electronic outreach to veterans, federal Chief Information Officer Steven VanRoekel said. Another substantial part of the increase will go toward IT initiatives to improve border security managed by the Homeland Security Department, he said. The 2 percent hike actually represents a spending reduction after accounting for inflation, VanRoekel said.
President Obama Seeks Slight Increase in Tech Spending for Fiscal 2014
The fiscal 2014 budget proposal unveiled by the White House identifies a few goals for recruiting, hiring and retaining federal workers, including some that relate specifically to the federal IT workforce.
Those goals include identifying specific skills gaps in mission critical occupations like IT and cybersecurity, modifying the federal personnel system, addressing the pending retirement wave and expanding telework programs, all of which are critical items in maintaining and strengthening the federal IT workforce. Specifically, the budget seeks to build on efforts made by the Office of Personnel Management and the Chief Human Capital Officers Council in identifying critical skills gaps in areas like IT and cybersecurity. OPM already has designated leaders from agencies whose missions depend on these occupations and meets with these leaders regularly to discuss their progress in recruiting, hiring and retaining in these fields, the budget states.
2014 Budget Invests in IT Workforce
“Obama phone” is the widely used — and misleading — nickname of a 28-year-old federal program known as Lifeline.
It provides discounts, averaging $9.25 a month, on phone service for 13.3 million low-income subscribers. In the 3 1/2 years after false rumors started that the Obama administration was giving free cellphones to poor people — and six months after a racially charged video about it went viral — a once-obscure phone service subsidy is getting renewed scrutiny on Capitol Hill. There are growing calls in Congress to end or drastically cut back Lifeline; later this month, the House Commerce Committee will hold a hearing that could help determine its fate. “The program has nearly tripled in size from $800 million in 2009 to $2.2 billion per year in 2012,” the senior Republicans on the Commerce Committee wrote in a March 26 letter to the Democratic minority. “American taxpayers — and we as their elected representatives — need to know how much of this growth is because of waste, fraud and abuse.” In Obama’s first term, amid evidence of widespread fraud, the Federal Communications Commission moved to crack down on the program, saving what it predicts will be $400 million this year, on top of $214 million in 2012. But in the view of many conservatives, the “Obama phone” has become Exhibit A in the case against a liberal president who they believe is doling out goodies to make people more dependent on government.
‘Obama phones’ subsidy program draws new scrutiny on the Hill
[Commentary] The Lifeline program is a good and necessary thing.
It was started under President Reagan because it’s necessary and reasonable to provide the poor and the infirm with basic telephone service even when they can’t afford it for reasons of health and safety. Poor people need the ability to report crimes, sick people need the ability to call ambulances, the elderly and isolated need the ability to stay in touch with family, the unemployed need the ability to seek and gain employment, and all people of limited means need the ability to contact emergency services during weather-related crises and when power goes out. These abilities benefit society as a whole, and they’re basic responsibilities we all share for those of our fellow citizens who are less well off than most of us. There is no rational reason to limit Lifeline to wireline phones, and doing so will in fact delay the phaseout of Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS) and impair the transition to the Internet of the future. All the rationales for Lifeline are enhanced if the program is shifted from wireline phones to mobile ones, especially those related to emergencies; the original Obamaphone was actually a Bush Katrinaphone, after all.
Obamaphone in the Crosshairs