The White House has announced that it's releasing $795 million in 66 new broadband grants and loans across the country in the latest rollout of stimulus funding.
The awards range from a $5.2 million network infrastructure grant in McCarthy, Alaska to $17.5 million to anchor community institutions in Washington D.C. that will serve residents with high-speed Internet access.
In a speech this morning at Andrews Air Force Base, Obama described how the awards will create jobs 5,000 immediate jobs and more in the long term.
"And once we emerge from the immediate crisis, the long-term economic gains to communities that have been left behind in the digital age will be immeasurable," he said. The announcement came amid a lackluster jobs report this morning, reported by my colleague Neil Irwin.
So far, the administration has doled out $2.7 billion in grants, which is less than half of the $7.2 billion set aside in the stimulus plan for broadband Internet projects. The new funding will come from the Department of Commerce. That agency's National Telecommunications and Information Administration and the Department of Agriculture have been responsible for the dispersement of stimulus funds.
The administration says this will result in "5,000 immediate jobs," in in the long term will help bring rural and under-served Americans up to speed, so to speak. But in the wake of the this month's bad jobs report, it's seems a little late, and a little puny. Yglesias:
I think this episode highlights some of the tensions and problems that have plagued our efforts at doing discretionary fiscal stimulus on an adequate scale. In the popular imagining, the big problem with government is that it’s wasteful and inefficient. So if you want to build political support for an agenda of activist government, in practice it’s crucially to be extremely careful with how you dole out the money. But care is the enemy of speed.
Speed, and a good dose of spending the money that's already been targeted as stimulus is the last hope for job creation in the near term, like before November. It would also undercut the Republicans' argument for using unspent stimulus funding for unemployment benefits, a drum they've been beating for the entire 11 weeks in which they've been blocking the UI extensions.
The White House needs to find a way to pivot off of the strong focus on the stabilization of the economy and the accomplishments of the stimulus, to acknowledging the reality of the desperate need to do more. They can do both, in fact, by pointing out the success of the stimulus thus far and saying "look, we've proved government spending works, so let's get more out there, because the country needs it."