Senators: Expand ReConnect Program to Support Rural Telehealth

A bipartisan group of senators is urging the Department of Agriculture to amend a two-year-old broadband funding program to give rural states more opportunities to improve their telehealth programs.

In a letter this week to USDA Secretary Sonny Perdue, the nine senators argue that the ReConnect Program unfairly discriminates against rural states that have received federal funding for satellite service, even though that service isn’t considered sufficient to support Internet connectivity.

“This USDA-imposed restriction – which is not required by law – prevents rural communities across the country from receiving their share of over $500 million in federal funding for high-speed broadband, which is vital to reducing the digital divide and harnessing important opportunities in telemedicine and online education,” the senators wrote.

Lack of adequate broadband has often been cited as a barrier to the adoption of telehealth and mHealth services, particularly in rural and remote parts of the country.

This dispute stems back to 2018, when the Federal Communications Commission awarded almost $1.5 billion to a variety of broadband providers, including 200,000 rural sites across the country receiving services by satellite. According to the senators, more than half of funding recipients in 16 states are receiving funding only for satellite service, including more than 90 percent of the programs in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Maine, Mississippi and Oregon.

“Local communities, who were not consulted on whether or not they considered satellite service as their best option, can neither reject the FCC funding awarded to their areas nor can they, under current rules, avail themselves of future opportunities to obtain FCC or USDA support for better-quality broadband,” the letter states.

Also created in 2018, the ReConnect Program makes federal funding available to applicants to develop broadband networks with a download speed of at least 25 Megabytes per second (Mbps). Roughly $512 million has been set aside this year for programs that have broadband service below 10 Mbps download speed.

But communities who receive funding for satellite-based broadband services are ineligible.

According to the Senators, Congress “left the Secretary of Agriculture with extensive flexibility to determine eligibility criteria” for the ReConnect Program.

“USDA has already correctly recognized the deficiencies of satellite services,” the Senators wrote. “Current satellite services offers much lower bandwidth caps, suffers from lower reliability and incurs higher latency than fiber and fixed wireless services. These drawbacks make satellite service ill-suited for the telemedicine, mental health services and interactive distance learning broadband applications that are critical for rural Americans.”

The letter is signed by Sens. Ron Wyden (D-OR), John Barrasso (R-WY), Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Patty Murray (D-WA), Mike Enzi (R-WY), Doug Jones (D-AL), Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), Tom Udall (D-NM) and Angus King (I-ME).