Four years ago, then-candidate Joe Biden pledged to make affordable and reliable internet access for all Americans a priority of his administration. Now, that pledge looks to be yet another empty promise from a failed president.
In 2020, as part of the “Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force Recommendations,” the Biden campaign asserted that “in the 21st century, the Internet is not optional.” To that end, they pledged that a Biden administration would “increase public investment in rural broadband infrastructure and offer low-income Americans subsidies for accessing high-speed internet.”
Everything seemed to be on course when Biden signed the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act into law in November 2021. A portion of that bill was the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment Program (BEAD), which allotted $42.5 billion toward creating high-speed internet access for Americans in rural areas. Last March, the Biden Department of Commerce touted another $65 billion investment in expanding internet access.
But there’s just one problem: Despite spending more than the entire GDP of Switzerland, not one foot of new broadband cable has been laid in the United States under the BEAD program. The main reason for this appears to be endless red tape and political grudges from the Biden administration.
As The Washington Times has reported, the Biden administration’s rural broadband funding comes with a tangle of strings attached, including climate change mandates, requirements that providers prioritize “certain segments of the workforce, such as individuals with past criminal records” when building broadband networks, and preferences for hiring union workers, who are scarce in many rural areas.
Notably, virtually none of these requirements are outlined in the infrastructure law itself. All are instead stipulations unilaterally imposed by the Biden administration.
In a letter to Alan Davidson, who runs the BEAD program as head of the Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), 11 Republican senators blasted the BEAD rules, which they said “divert resources away from bringing broadband service to rural America and are inconsistent with NTIA’s statutory authority in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act… NTIA’s failure to resolve these concerns will prolong the digital divide and put billions of scarce taxpayer dollars at risk.”
Compounding the issue further is the federal government’s effort to regulate the rates companies can charge for broadband access. The program is managed by the Department of Commerce, which wants to control the prices companies can charge users for Internet access. Rural Internet access requires extensive infrastructure for fewer customers than in urban areas. Therefore, consumer costs are typically higher as a matter of economic necessity. However, the Biden Commerce Department hopes to cap rates below profitability for providers.
As a result of this bureaucratic interference, the first broadband project is not expected to commence until late 2025, and completion of the program is not projected until 2030, nine years after the program’s enactment. While every state and territory in the country submitted proposals for the program, only nine states and the District of Columbia have received approval, leaving many rural communities in the digital dark.
The Biden administration’s utter failure on rural broadband has caught the attention of Elon Musk, who posted on X that the program “is an outrageous waste of taxpayer money and is utterly failing to serve people in need.” Among his various other endeavors, Musk is also the founder of Starlink Services, which provides satellite internet to consumers from virtually anywhere in the country with a clear view of the sky.
Brandon Carr, the senior Republican on the Federal Communications Commission, joined Elon Musk in voicing his frustration with the government’s glacial pace and wasteful spending, noting that in 2022 Biden’s FCC revoked “the $800 million awarded to Elon Musk’s Starlink under the Trump administration.” Carr says the original Starlink contract would have provided high-speed Internet to 642,000 rural locations and could be connected in a fraction of the time. This would also be significantly less destabilizing to local communities and the environment.
Carr has previously suggested that the Biden administration’s decision to cancel the Starlink contract while investing exponentially more in broadband was naked political bias, writing that it left Americans “waiting on the wrong side of the digital divide.” According to Wireless Estimator, “Starlink had previously committed to offering high-speed internet in rural areas for $1,377 per location in support. The Biden administration is now spending $5,125 per location.”
This is far from the first Biden-era program to become enmeshed in red tape roadblocks. As previously reported, Biden had pledged to build half a million new electric vehicle charging stations across America. Despite $7.5 billion in investment, only seven stations are up and running.
But even as the government bleeds taxpayer funds and rural areas go underserved, one entity is undoubtedly benefiting from the onerous bureaucracy—the bureaucracy itself. In 2023, 25 percent of all new jobs created in America were in the federal government.
Thus far, programs like BEAD seem to have succeeded only in bloating government bureaucracy even further. But as seems to almost always be the case, the government’s gain is the American people’s loss.
Andrew Shirley is a veteran speechwriter and AMAC Newsline columnist. His commentary can be found on X at @AA_Shirley.
