Figures released by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies have revealed that Comcast’s altruistic offer will provide 2.5 million low-income households with broadband, with the price tag set as $10 a month.

Approximately 63.5 percent of U.S. homes currently have access to the internet — under Comcast’s new provision that figure will rise to 65.9 percent, a 2.4 percent increase. Within the low-income camp, the increase is a slightly more notable 7 percent.

Increased access to the internet is increasingly accepted by demographic analysts as an indication of socio-economic advancement, and an essential tool to full participate in today’s economy and society. Joint research by National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) and the Economics and Statistics Administration revealed strong socio-economic patterns in broadband distribution: 94 percent of homes with an income over $100,000 have access to broadband, compared with only 36 percent of homes earning less than $25,000. Education levels also influence the distribution of broadband with 84 percent of household with at least one college graduate having access to broadband, whereas only 28 percent of homes with no high school graduates are online.

But Comcast’s offer to increase access to the internet for America’s low-income population remains an overwhelmingly tiny step within an acquisition that confirms, and guarantees, Camcast’s position as the nation’s largest internet and cable provider.

Comcast’s initially voluntary promise to serve low-income Americans was made a compulsory part of the deal by the FCC — whose role is to protect the public’s interest and play arbitrator between media conglomerates in such deals. FCC Commissioner Michael J. Copps remained outspokenly against the deal and warning that the merging of the two media giants put “new media on a road traditional media should never have taken- [further eroding] diversity, localism and competition.”

[W]hat goes unanswered is who is going to carry out the President’s orders. What is not included in the President’s plan is how he plans on dealing with the crisis in the government contracting workforce. Take the Pentagon for example. Over the past several years “acquisition workforce has dwindled by 25 percent, while the contracting workload has increased by a factor of seven.” The Defense Contract Management Agency alone has lost more than half its workforce and according to a Pentagon estimate “in 1997 one auditor was responsible for $642 million in private contracts; today one auditor is responsible for $2 billion in private contracts.”

This problem is only going to get worse as more than half of all contract auditors are expected to retire within the next 10 years. What is needed are not only more contract management officials, but the Pentagon also needs to make this career path an attractive one for career officers so that they are persuaded to stay with it.

A good point. It’s worth remembering that the Obama memo lays out the parameters for a review process, not its conclusion. The Levin-McCain legislation that Obama backed on Wednesday would creates a new acquisitions czar, the director of independent cost assessment, and a fair reading of the memo suggests that it would view acquisitions officials as the sort of “inherently governmental” functionaries worth keeping. So Cohen might be a bit premature.

Furthermore, the key figures to watch on the review are Peter Orszag, Rob Nabors and Steve Kosiak at the Office of Management and Budget; Scott Gration at NASA; and Bob Gates at the Pentagon. Kosiak, Gates and Gration, at least, understand the role for qualified and independent acquisition officials at the Defense Department. (Gration is a recently-retired Air Force general.) Speaking about Kosiak, longtime defense-reform gadfly Winslow Wheeler told me, “I know him, I like him, he’s a smart guy, and he’s well informed. It’s gonna be a real test for him [to see] whether he can translate his academic talents into bureaucratic talents to fight the bureaucracy on this and make new regulations that really mean something.” All of this remains to be seen, but Cohen might have put his finger on a target that the review is likely to acquire anyway.