Anyone who has watched Biden’s utter failure at his promised electrification of America will be unsurprised to learn that Team Biden’s uselessness extends to another boondoggle promised three years ago: high speed internet access for rural Americans.
Since pledging $42.5 to connect rural homes and businesses to high speed internet, not a single home or business has been connected. Not one. In three years.
The senior Republican on the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is blaming the Biden administration for a lack of high-speed internet projects that were approved under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, comparing the situation to the dearth of electric vehicle charging stations that were also supposed to be built with the funds.”In 2021, the Biden Administration got $42.45 billion from Congress to deploy high-speed Internet to millions of Americans,” GOP-appointed Commissioner Brendan Carr wrote on X last week. “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.”Commenters on social media noted that the funds were allocated to the states, arguing the Biden administration is not responsible for any delays. But Carr says it is the Biden administration that is holding up progress.”There’s no question that the 2021 law put some process in place, but the Biden administration decided to layer on top of that a Byzantine additional set of hoops that states have to go through before the administration will approve them to actually get these funds and start completing the builds,” Carr told FOX Business in an interview.. . . . Carr said the program has been mired in bureaucratic delay, and he accused the administration of “sitting on applications from states that are attempting to move forward.” He said progress is even moving in the opposite direction in many cases.Last Friday, in a post on X, Carr said the holdup is due to a “partisan political agenda” that says includes, “climate change mandates, tech biases, DEI requirements, favoring government-run networks + more.”
Why has this program been such a raging failure? Team Biden, like all Democrats, has bogged themselves down with a series of DIE initiatives and requirements, environmental regulations and red tape, and their insistence on attempting to control the states (and the market) from DC.
Residents in rural America are eager to access high-speed internet under a $42.5 billion federal modernization program, but not a single home or business has been connected to new broadband networks nearly three years after President Biden signed the funding into law, and no project will break ground until sometime next year.Lawmakers and internet companies blame the slow rollout on burdensome requirements for obtaining the funds, including climate change mandates, preferences for hiring union workers and the requirement that eligible companies prioritize the employment of “justice-impacted” people with criminal records to install broadband equipment.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.The slow pace of funding allocation and compliance will push the project start dates for modernizing rural internet access to 2025 and 2026, according to a timeline officials outlined in a House budget hearing.Federal Communications Commissioner Brendan Carr said the program’s goal of providing high-speed internet to most underserved areas will not be fully realized until 2030, nine years after its enactment.
I sincerely doubt Democrats will have connected — or allowed Republicans to connect — a single home by 2030.
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