Congressional Democrats are panicking over the Trump Administration’s reforms to the wasteful Biden-era Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program. Biden’s 2021 infrastructure bill allocated a whopping $42.5 billion to distribute to states to subsidize high-speed internet for primarily rural and underpopulated areas, which the Commerce Department’s National Telecommunication and Information Authority (NTIA) distributes.
Like most of Biden’s “infrastructure” programs, BEAD was filled with DEI mandates, climate regulations, and crony favoritism, which limited most funding to fiber internet, while virtually banning low-earth-orbit satellite internet. The Trump administration and Republicans in Congress signaled early this year that such wasteful programs would be targeted by the Trump White House.
Fortunately, the Senate recently confirmed Arielle Roth to lead NTIA, which will administer the program and implement the Trump administration’s reforms. Roth served as the top telecom staffer for Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and the Senate Commerce Committee, where she helped the Senator document the BEAD program’s abuses, giving her the perfect experience and skills to implement these reforms.
As Sen. Cruz noted, BEAD’s “technology bias against non-fiber broadband will drive up costs by billions of dollars and likely deprive some communities of any broadband access at all.” Four years after the Bill’s passage, BEAD failed to connect one household to the internet.
Fiber internet is often inefficient in sparsely populated areas. Some proposals, approved by the Biden NTIA, charge tens of thousands of dollars per home across many states. The Biden NTIA even proposed giving $547,254 for one “underserved” location in Washington, D.C. (hardly an underserved area for high-speed internet).
Trump’s FCC Chairman, Brendan Carr, called BEAD a “$42 billion program for expanding Internet infrastructure into a thicket of red tape and saddled it with progressive policy goals that have nothing to do with quickly connecting Americans,” specifically calling out the “DEI requirements,” “Climate change agenda,” and “technology bias.”
Hellbound and Down 