The Federal Communications Commission has handed in its formal budget request for 2017, requesting $358.3 million in budget authority for the next fiscal year.
The commission said its 2017 budget request will be used to support four key strategic goals: expansion of competitive telecommunications networks, protecting public interest goals, ensuring that networks are widely available to the American public and effectively managing the FCC’s resources.
The budget request represents a decrease of $25,726,497 million or 6.7% from the FY 2016 level of $384,012,497. In FY2016, the commission requested $25.7 million to move the commission to a new facility and to reconfigure existing space at the FCC’s headquarters in Washington. That work is not quite done, and the commission has requested a second installment in 2017 of $16.8 million to complete the move. Those efforts should pay off in the long run, the commission said, with an estimated cost savings of up to $119 million over the next 15 years through reduced rental costs.
The commission also requested funds in FY2017 to follow through with IT upgrades, including rewriting legacy applications as part of a shift to a modern cloud-based platform.
The commission’s FY2017 budget submission also includes a request for an increase in the cap on spending for spectrum auctions. The FCC is requesting $124 million, which is an increase of $7 million over 2016, to make more spectrum available for commercial use, to cover the costs of administering the TV incentive auctions, to fund ongoing licensing as a result of successful auctions and to plan for additional future auctions.
The FCC’s FY2017 budget request can be found here.
