The Patriot Post® · Biden's $42 Billion Broadband Bust

We’re hesitant to call it a boondoggle, because a boondoggle suggests pointless work or activity. But in this case, there doesn’t seem to have been any work or activity done at all, pointless or otherwise.

Since 2021. When it was signed into law.

We’re talking about the utter failure of the Biden administration to so much as break ground on the $42.5 billion high-speed Internet initiative for rural Americans that was promised and approved under his $1.2 trillion “Infrastructure” “Investment” and “Jobs” Act.

It was in the wee hours of Friday, November 5, 2021, that 13 turncoat House Republicans got snookered by their Democrat colleagues and gave a whiff of legitimacy to a pork-filled spending orgy that then made its way to Joe Biden’s desk. The, ahem, infrastructure law did allocate some money for actual infrastructure, but its hallmark was a multibillion-dollar slush fund for leftist special interests.

“In 2021,” said Republican Federal Communications Commissioner Brendan Carr, “the Biden Administration got $42.45 billion from Congress to deploy high-speed Internet to millions of Americans. Years later, it has not connected even 1 person with those funds. In fact, it now says that no construction projects will even start until 2025 at earliest.”

Is anyone surprised? And is it mere coincidence that most rural Americans are not Democrats and are not inclined to vote for Biden on November 5? These Americans have been lagging behind, waiting for broadband service to deliver the promise of the Information Age. Still today, many of these people are served by slow Internet speeds traveling across copper lines that can’t transmit a large volume of data. And some of these folks have no Internet at all.

“There hasn’t been a single shovel’s worth of dirt that has even been turned towards connecting people,” added a clearly disgusted Carr.

And we thought Team Biden’s EV charging station plan was going badly.

What, exactly, are the reasons for this years-long holdup in rural broadband? Carr sheds some light, accusing the Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration of slow-walking the approval of applications from states. “They just put too many steps in the process,” he said. “The addition of a substantive wish list of progressive ideas they’ve layered in certainly didn’t help with the timeline.”

What sorts of bad ideas might that wish list entail? Here are three, all of them doozies: requiring applicants for funding to prefer the hiring of union workers, even though they’re often scarce in rural areas; requiring applicants to prioritize the employment of “certain segments of the workforce,” including “justice impacted” people with criminal records; and requiring eligible entities to account for climate both now and “as our climate continues to change over the coming decades.”

On top of all this, the Biden administration has its over-regulatory hands in the thick of things. As The Washington Times reports, “The Commerce Department, which is distributing the funds under the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment (BEAD) program, is also attempting to regulate consumer rates, lawmakers say. This puts them at odds with internet providers and congressional Republicans, who say the law prohibits such regulation.”

Here, it’s well worth remembering what the news was six months ago when Biden’s hyper-politicized FCC revoked an $886 million subsidy to Elon Musk’s satellite-based SpaceX Starlink Internet service. That subsidy was meant to bring high-speed broadband to these rural areas, where the cost of running cable is prohibitive.

As the New York Post reported at the time, “The five-member FCC, led by Democrat-appointed chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel, affirmed that decision … finding that Starlink had ‘failed to demonstrate that it could deliver the promised service.’”

That claim, though, was pure rubbish. What the FCC did was demand that Starlink prove that its capabilities would be sufficient not just now but a decade from now. As Carr noted, “The FCC did not require — and has never required — any other award winner to show that it met its service obligation years ahead of time.”

Thus, the decision can only be seen as vindictive since it wasn’t accompanied by a granting of the subsidy to a better, more suitable provider.

We hear a lot these days about “equity” and “inclusion,” about people of color getting short-changed in one way or another. But high-speed Internet is readily available — and readily subsidized — to any needy person living in an urban area.

And yet, the Biden administration is clearly saying: No high-speed Internet for you, you Republican rubes. Where’s the equity? Where’s the inclusion?