FCC Anticipates New HQ Contract Award This Spring
The FCC provided a more detailed breakdown of the FY 2017 administration budget request that described the specific agency needs in terms of IT and HQ relocation. The 141-page document laid out why it saw the need for its $358.29 million budget request, a total that included $16.87 million for agency HQ relocation or restacking and including information beyond what the administration initially made available Tuesday (see 1602090067).
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“This process is necessitated by the expiration of the FCC’s current lease in October 2017,” the FCC said in its request document. “To move forward with the process, the FCC already secured oversight permission from the U.S. House of Representative[s] Committee on Transportation & Infrastructure in July 2015, and the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works in August 2015. Based on the current timeline, the award for the contract for the move or the reconfiguring of the existing space should be issued in the spring of 2016. The new contract will provide a more efficient utilization of space to reduce the Commission’s footprint and also provides savings of up to $119 million over fifteen years through reduced rental costs.”
Later in the request, the FCC spelled out possible consequences of staying at the current Portals location. “If the Commission does not move or restack the building before the termination of the lease, GSA has informed the Commission that the new lease payments will increase by approximately $9 million per year, and the lessor could require a 20% premium over the current rental rate for any holdover period,” the agency said. “GSA published the FCC’s requirements for the new headquarters on FedBizOpps in July 2015.”
The agency detailed how it has been using funds at the operational level. It also included more detail on the three legislative proposals -- one standard proposal involving spectrum license fees widely believed to go nowhere and two other proposals, one to auction domestic satellite service spectrum licenses and another to auction or assign via fee the spectrum in 1675-1680 MHz, outlined in earlier administration request documents Tuesday.
The FCC had 1,650 full-time-equivalent workers for FY 2016, and under its FY 2017 request, the agency would have the same number of FTEs. That's a far lower number than the agency had in many previous years (see 1512150011). The budget proposal included charts illustrating how many FTEs are devoted to spectrum auction activities and the number of contractors employed.
Of the request, $4.67 million would be for overhaul of IT systems, a priority that FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler has repeatedly testified is necessary. “Moving to the cloud and rewriting applications within a cloud infrastructure enables the Commission to achieve an estimated long-term cost avoidance of $5 million to $10 million over five years in hardware and personnel/contractor costs,” the agency said. A one-time request for an increase to $800,000 and an increase of a base funding of $400,000 would go toward what the FCC calls a geospatial information system solution. “The best option to address these challenges is to centralize the data into one modern cloudbased hosting solution that will keep the data organized, secured, and accessible for all FCC stakeholders,” it said of the existing maps section of fcc.gov.
The budget request also would allocate $1.6 million to target what the FCC calls “improper payments and under-collections of contributions” to USF. The agency “has determined that the USF program would benefit from the implementation of technology to identify, detect, and prevent improper payments before they have an opportunity to occur,” it said. “By applying predictive analytics to USF claims to identify abnormal or suspicious patterns prior to payments going out, the FCC believes that it can better limit improper payments and increase the effectiveness of its efforts to detect and prevent fraud.”
The request includes detailed information about the auction activities and said $124 million is dedicated to the auction work. Some of that funding would be to implement the 2015 Spectrum Pipeline Act included in the fall budget deal. “The Act requires the FCC to reallocate and auction 30 megahertz of spectrum identified by the Secretary of Commerce for reallocation from Federal use to non-Federal use, shared use, or a combination,” the agency said. “The Act also appropriates funds from the Spectrum Relocation Fund to support activities by Federal entities to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of Federal use of spectrum in order to make Federal spectrum available for non-Federal use, shared use, or a combination, and requires the FCC, as part of its role on the Technical Panel, to review Federal entities’ proposals for funds for these purposes. Additionally, the Act also requires the Commission to submit four separate reports to Congress.”