It might be a longshot but it seemed like there might be some potential here for broadband adoption projects…
On Monday, February 2, President Obama sent his budget proposal for fiscal year (FY) 2016 to Capitol Hill. The overall proposed spending number for the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) for FY 2016 is $23.5 billion in discretionary spending, down from $23.8 billion in actual appropriated discretionary funding for FY 2015.
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Rural Business and Community Development
We are delighted that the budget includes a significant plus up for the Rural Microentrepreneur Assistance Program (RMAP), which provides loan capital and technical assistance funding to local and regional organizations that in turn provide microloans and business development technical assistance to rural microentrepreneurs. The budget request includes $2.65 million for microlending and $2 million for grants to support microbusiness training and technical assistance. In FY 2015, Congress did not appropriate discretionary funding for RMAP. We will be strongly supporting the President’s request for RMAP funding for FY 2016.
We are deeply disappointed that the budget request includes cuts to two of the most effective and popular USDA Rural Development programs – the National Sustainable Agriculture Information Service (also known as ATTRA), which each year provides hundreds of thousands of farmers, extension agents, and other practitioners with technical information and guidance on a wide range of sustainable agriculture topics, and the Value-Added Producer Grants (VAPG) program, which provides competitively awarded grants to create or develop value-added producer-owned businesses. The budget proposes discretionary funds VAPG at $10 million, in addition to the program’s farm bill mandatory funding. This is a decrease of 9 percent from last year’s enacted discretionary level for the program. The budget proposes to cut ATTRA funding by 16 percent, from $2.5 million to $2.1 million.
The budget request includes $10 million for the Rural Energy for America Program (REAP) for farm and rural renewable energy systems and energy efficiency improvements. The funding would be divided 50/50 between loans and grants. This proposed discretionary funding would be in addition to the $50 million in mandatory funding provided by the new farm bill on an annual basis. The proposed discretionary level represents a greater than seven-fold increase over the actual FY 2015 level.
The President’s budget request includes $37.9 million in guaranteed loans for local and regional food enterprise development within the Business and Industry Guaranteed Loan Program. This is a reduction of nearly 18 percent from the actual FY 2015 appropriation. By statute, five percent of funding for the guaranteed loan program is dedicated to financing local and regional food enterprises. We will be urging Congress to reject the proposed cut.