Biden's $42 Billion Broadband DEI Boondoggle

Four years ago, the Biden administration pushed through the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program in an effort to give 25 million rural Americans access to broadband internet.

Four years later, no rural customer has been hooked up to broadband. And the reason can be found in the name of the bill: "equity."

Republican member of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Brendan Carr explains. “The shovels haven’t turned any dirt, and Americans want to know what’s going on with these policies,” Carr said. “It’s sort of a microcosm for many of these broader concerns."

"Are they concerned about the digital divide, or are they concerned about DEI?” he asked.

Carr is in line to become chairman of the FCC, and he's the one who now has to deal with this $42 billion turkey.

It's not a bad idea. Broadband access is about more than just speed. More information can be carried to more people, improving productivity significantly. Broadband is also more secure and provides access to the cloud.

However, the execution of this program has been a bureaucratic nightmare. The process of setting it up has been dogged by stupidity, confusion, and plain old laziness.

But for most states, the process has been a confusing slog, and it may take them another year before they can offer new service. For instance, state broadband departments, most of which were hastily stood up after the program was announced, were required to use new maps created by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to determine where broadband service was most needed. But the early versions of the maps were pulling in bad data, and it took months for the FCC to fix them.
“Waiting for the FCC’s updated maps added a six- to eight-month delay,” Doug Dawson, a longtime consultant for the telecom industry, told The Free Press.

The DEI component of this program is beyond belief.

In addition, states had to prove that they promoted participation from minority-owned businesses, women-owned businesses, and “other socially or economically disadvantaged individual-owned businesses.” They also had to create a Five-Year Action Plan that required collaborating with unions and “underrepresented communities,” including prisoners, LGBTQI+ individuals, women, and people of color.

DEI posturing is unnecessarily adding billions of dollars and years to the program. Nathan Smith, director of economics and policy for the nonprofit Connected Nation, says that many states didn't even have a broadband department and had to create them.

“These state broadband offices are pretty new, and they’re being tasked with solving this problem that has, to some extent, flummoxed big federal agencies with lots of expertise like the FCC. So they had a hard job,” Smith said.

Did no Democrats in Washington ask the states how they were going to implement this turkey? Sheesh.

Because Democrats and a Democratic administration dreamed up the program and were tasked with implementing it, there was a clear sense of unreality surrounding it.

Complicating it all was a requirement that internet providers offer a low-cost plan—which some states set as low as $30 per month. America’s Communications Association, an industry group focusing on small and rural markets, called that figure “completely unmoored from the economic realities of deploying and operating networks in the highest cost, hardest-to-reach areas that BEAD funding is precisely designed to reach.”

"We don't need no stinkin' 'economic realities,'" said the Democrats. "Economic realities are for sissies and Republicans. We make up our 'realities' as we go along."

It's too late to rip the DEI requirements from the implementation of this program. They are embedded in the operation of BEAD as deeply as the law itself. The states can tweak the implementation of BEAD but they can't unilaterally repeal sections they don't like.

Only Congress can do that. Overhauling the entire program might be possible if there's time to tackle such a large undertaking.