WASHINGTON, DC - Hey, it’s only a few billion here and there. Just weeks after Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg was mocked by none other than CBS News’ Margaret Brennan for his department only building seven or eight electric vehicle charging stations for a cool $7.5 billion, news comes that another Biden boondoggle isn’t doing much better. In fact, it is doing much worse.
In the Biden administration’s highly-touted “Infrastructure Act” signed three years ago, American taxpayers forked over $42.45 billion to “deploy” high-speed internet to “millions of Americans.”
In a post on X in January, Biden (or more accurately whoever tweets for him) wrote:
“When I became president, 24 million Americans didn’t have access to affordable high speed internet. Now, we’re well on our way to connecting every last American to affordable, reliable high-speed internet by 2030.”
Wow, sounds promising. So how many Americans does “well on our way” cover? Zero. Nada. Zilch.
In a tweet on X, FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr defined what “well on our way” means.
“In 2021, 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 the earliest.”
This is the Washington, D.C. swamp explained in one X post.
Despite receiving the money in 2021, the project wasn’t announced until approximately one year ago.
Of course, the Biden administration is more concerned with equity than efficiency. The “Internet for All” program bears the acronym BEAD–Broadband, Equity, Access, and Deployment.
Of course as expected, excuses abound. According to Alan Davidson, administrator of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), he warned Congress in 2023, that a lapse in funding of the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) would have a detrimental effect on the BEAD program.
“Affordability is critical to our success here, and ACP has played an essential role in recent years in making sure that we’ve got affordability in Internet access,” said Davidson. “We won’t be able to reach our goal of affordable networks without it.”
In other words, that $42.45 billion apparently doesn’t cover the entire cost of the BEAD program. The ACP supports approximately 18 million households with internet subsidies averaging $30 a month, unless they are on tribal lands–then they get $75 per month.
So it appears Biden’s claim that the “affordable high-speed internet” would be covered by the tidy sum of $42.45 billion was a bit inaccurate. As always, it will cost taxpayers more…much more.
The ACP ended on June 1, 2024.
Carr noted that much of the problem with the BEAD program is the administration’s partisan political agenda, which he called “a liberal wish list that has nothing to do with connecting Americans. Climate change mandates, tech biases, DEI requirements, favoring government-run networks,” etc.
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