FCC to Investigate D-Block Auction 54
eweekhickins writes "Feds and public interest groups are taking seriously accusations that someone tampered with the wireless spectrum auction process. The block of spectrum that was supposed to go to emergency responders failed to get close to the reserve price, raising suspicions that someone was trying to make money off the Sept. 11 national tragedy. But that would never happen, right?" This is a follow up to last week's allegations.
Re:So basically.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:What's with the Summary? (Score:3, Interesting)
I agree with the earlier poster - there is no connection between the bandwidth auction results and 9/11 *except* that there is a requirement to support expanded first-responder communication in the same band. How is money made by not commercializing (monetizing) the band? A failed auction benefits no one...
Re:So basically.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Same old fraud (Score:5, Interesting)
I've worked in companies working around the edges of various issues that have become "national emergencies". There's always people doing yeoman work in those areas who could work miracles with a marginal increase in funding. But they never get a marginal increase in funding.
What happens is that once the politicians decide there is an emergency, there is a deluge of cash. Often, the people who've been doing the work all along never see this as people closer to the budgeting process divert the money into crash programs run by people who have no knowledge or interest in what as actually bee done. Other times, they end up with vast quantities of cash that they have to spend right away; the emergency becomes spending all the money before anybody accuses you of dragging your feet. I've seen cases where agencies have literally paid millions of dollars to have a web site with a email backed fill in form that could have been done (by several competent and independent evaluations) for around $50K. The reason was that they never had anything like two million dollars in the kitty before, and had no idea of how to spend it. If they had had a $100K windfall, they could have spent it very well indeed, but they didn't even know where to begin to spend the money they'd been given; certainly not fast enough.
So they turned to a company that specialized in absorbing lots of cash on federal contracts quickly.
I'll let you in on a dirty little secret about government contracting. All those rules that supposedly keep Uncle Sam from being fleeced actually make it easier for somebody with political connections to take him to the cleaner. The reason is that the only way to absorb the money generated by the federal government in a "national emergency", and comply with all the accounting rules, is to have a company or a subsidiary that specializes in absorbing federal money and filling out all the paperwork. The government doesn't buy what it needs in an emergency on the open market, but by outfits starting with Halliburton and all the way down to small time operations that eat up a few millions here and there.
I was amazed and appalled the degree to which you could hire a lobbyist and make a quick buck on a shoeshine and a shell product, provided you were dealing with something "important".