In a bizarre last-minute change of the language approved for the upcoming $16.4 billion RDOF grant funds, the FCC inserted new language into the rules that would seem to eliminate grant applicants from accepting matching state grants for projects funded by the RDOF grants.

The new language specifically says that the RDOF grant program now excludes any geographic area that the Commission “know[s] to be awarded funding through the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s ReConnect Program or other similar federal or state broadband subsidy programs or those subject to enforceable broadband deployment obligations.”

It’s fully understandable that the FCC doesn’t want to award grant money from multiple federal grant programs for the same project, and that was a loophole that is sensible to close. I think most industry folks understood this to be true even if it wasn’t in writing.

But the idea of blocking states from making grants to supplement RDOF is counterintuitive. More than half of the states now have state broadband grant programs. It makes no sense for the FCC to tell states how they can spend (or in this case how they cannot spend) their state grant monies.

The whole concept of blocking state matching grants goes against the tradition of federal funding. The vast majority of federal funding programs for infrastructure encourage state matching funds and many programs require it. Matching state grants are used along with federal grants for building infrastructure such as roads, bridges, water and sewer systems, airports, etc. Why would the FCC want to block this for broadband?

The state grant programs that I’m most familiar with were planning to provide matching grants for some RDOF grants. Broadband offices at the state level understand that building broadband networks can be expensive and they know that in some cases the extra funding is needed to make broadband projects viable.

It’s important to remember that the RDOF grants are aimed at the most remote customers in the country – customers that, by definition, will require the largest investment per customer to bring broadband. This is due almost entirely due to the lower household densities in the RDOF grant areas. Costs can be driven up also by local conditions like rocky soil or rough terrain. Federal funding that provides enough money to build broadband in the plains states is likely not going to be enough to induce somebody to build in the remote parts of Appalachia where the RDOF grants are most needed.

State grant programs often also have other agendas. For example, the Border-to-Border grants in Minnesota won’t fund broadband projects that can’t achieve at least 100 Mbps download speeds. This was a deliberate decision so that government funding wouldn’t be wasted to build broadband infrastructure that will be too slow and obsolete soon after it’s constructed. By contrast, the FCC RDOF program is allowing applicants proposing speeds as slow as 25 Mbps. It’s not hard to argue that speed is already obsolete.

I know ISPs that were already hoping for a combination of federal and state grants to build rural infrastructure. If the FCC kills matching grants, then they will be killing the plans for such ISPs that wanted to use the grants to build fiber networks – a permanent broadband solution. Even with both state and federal grants, these ISPs were planning to take on a huge debt burden to make it work.

If the matching grants are killed, I have no doubt that the RDOF money will still be awarded to somebody. However, instead of going to a rural telco or electric coop that wants to build fiber, the grants will go to the big incumbent telephone companies to waste money by pretending to goose rural DSL up to 25 Mbps. Even worse, much of the funding might go to the satellite companies that offer nothing new and a product that people hate. I hate to engage in conspiracy theories, but one of the few justifications I can see for killing matching grants is to make it easier for the big incumbent telcos to win, and waste, another round of federal grant funding.