Federal Communications Commission FY 2017 Budget in Brief

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC or Commission) is pleased to present its fiscal year (FY) 2017 budget request. The Commission requests $358,286,000 in budget authority from regulatory fee collections to carry out its core statutory mission and Congressional mandates. This represents a decrease of $25,726,497 million or 6.7 percent from the FY 2016 level of $384,012,497, of which $44,168,497 was specifically made available for the necessary expenses associated with moving to a new facility or reconfiguring the existing space to significantly reduce space consumption. In FY 2017, the Commission requests the second installment of $16,866,992 for that same purpose. This represents the funds needed in FY 2017 to complete the move or reconfiguring of the existing space through the General Services Administration (GSA). This process is necessitated by the expiration of the FCC's current lease in October 2017. To move forward with the process, the FCC already secured oversight permission from the U. S. House of Representative 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. The Commission also requests funds to follow through on essential information technology (IT) upgrades that includes rewriting legacy applications as part of a modular "shift" to a modern, resilient cloud-based platform. These IT modernization efforts will allow the Commission to support IT systems, including licensing and public safety, with less funds in the future. These requests provide the necessary funding to continue IT modernization projects that the Commission already invested significant resources in during prior fiscal years. With the necessary funding, the FCC expects to realize costs savings between $2 million and $3 million by the end of the modernization efforts and an additional $5 million to $10 million over the next five years.