Happy Summer! Unfortunately, for much of our country this has been a summer of severe climate challenges. From extensive flooding to devastating wildfires many areas have had a tragic summer. Hopefully, the fall season will offer some much-needed relief.
Changes are in the wind for the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Rural Health Care (RHC) Healthcare Connect Fund (HCF) and its administration by the Universal Service Administrative Company (USAC). On July 16th, the FCC issued two Notices of Proposed Rule Making (NPRM).
The first NPRM continues the FCC’s effort to promote RHC efficiency and effectiveness. This NPRM is seeking comments on several program improvements. Some of the proposed changes are:
- Promote the use of lower-cost secondary (backup) services.
- Establishing an RHC Program list of eligible services.
- Adopting RHC Program performance metrics with a goal of making program application and processing faster and more effective.
- Eliminate the HCF annual report requirement.
CTC’s managing agent, HealthConnect Networks (HCN), represented by its President, Jim Rogers, is participating with colleagues across the country in an Ad Hoc Broadband for Rural Health Group. The Ad Hoc Group has been working over the last several months to craft and promote improvements to HCF and USAC. The Ad Hoc Group is very supportive of the HCF and USAC reform process and will be offering comments on the proposed rules. Specifically, comments will be made on the use of lower-cost backup services noting that lower-cost backup services may be inadequate since, generally speaking, backup services by definition have to mirror primary service capabilities and capacity. An eligible services list to provide clarity and transparency is also supported. Performance metrics which can provide benchmarks to measure efficiency and timeliness are very important. And eliminating the HCF annual report, which is a boiler plate report offering no real data, is a small but important improvement.
The second NPRM seeks to strengthen the FCC’s management and administration of the Universal Service Fund (USF), the source of funding for the RHC HCF. With this NPRM, the FCC is seeking comments on:
- Ways to streamline USAC processes and improve transparency, accountability, and cost effectiveness of USAC administration, and require USAC to report publicly on its speed of operations.
- Ways to improve the efficiency of audits of USF beneficiaries and assure timely recovery of improperly disbursed funding.
- Modifying FCC rules to codify the administrator’s ability to audit non-service providers.
- Modifying FCC rules governing audit controls to calculate recoveries by extrapolating from a statistically valid sample of disbursements.
- Ways to minimize the costs of USF administration.
- Updating the FCC rules on how USF funds are held in and disbursed from the U.S. Treasury.
- Whether the structure of the USF administration should change with changes to the administrator or its current responsibilities related to USF administration.
- Updating FCC rules regarding the USAC Board of Directors to ensure Board members avoid conflicts of interest, to reduce the size of the Board, and modifying the composition of the Board and its committees.
Again, the Ad Hoc Group is supporting the reform process and plans on providing relevant comments. The proposed changes to the audit process are a concern. The Group does not agree that there needs to be any changes made to the audit process and will comment in opposition to that rule change. In short, the Ad Hoc Group welcomes many of the proposed changes which should significantly improve the transparency and accountability of USAC and its operations. These are changes that are long overdue. With our experience in the past few years where Funding Commitment Letters (FCL) often are issued by USAC in the last quarter of the fiscal year for which funding was requested (i.e., FY 2025 began on July 1, 2025; FCLs were still being received in June 2026 and the final FCL for FY 2025 that CTC received was issued on 7/16/2026!). Receiving an FCL for funding that began 12 months ago is counterproductive and creates unnecessary administrative expense. CTC certainly appreciates the proactive approach that Jim and his staff are taking to support these much-needed USAC reforms.
In other news, CTC processed 126 funding requests for FY 2026 (July 1, 2026 to June 30, 2027) funding. Total funding requested is $5,705,883.57. Our thanks to the staff at HealthConnect Networks for their expertise and diligence in preparing and submitting these funding requests. Great work!
Thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule to read my remarks. I hope in some small way you find them helpful. My thanks to all of you who are a part of the CTC community. With your continued support, we look forward to continued success supporting healthcare across the country!
Brian Thibeau, President of CTC
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