Republicans Rewrite Infrastructure Broadband Grant Program To Give Elon Musk Billions, Potentially Delaying Deployments By Years

So you might recall that Republicans recently have been making a gigantic stink about how the $42.5 billion in broadband grants included in the infrastructure bill hadn’t actually connected anybody yet. I pointed out in detail why things have been admittedly slow; a big reason being that we had to completely remap broadband access after decades of corruption and incompetence.

After whining endlessly about the slow cadence of this particular broadband grant program (the Broadband Equity, Deployment, and Access program, or BEAD), Republicans, earlier this year, began making changes to it that largely helped giant telecoms and Elon Musk.

They’re eliminating requirements that resulting broadband be affordable for poor people. They’re eliminating already fairly decorative labor and climate build requirements. And most importantly, they’re rewriting the language so less money goes to local, high-capacity fiber ISPs, and more money goes to Elon Musk’s congested, expensive, Ozone-layer-depleting Starlink satellite broadband service.

The changes are, ironically enough, likely to cause some major additional delays in people actually getting broadband as states are forced to retool their compliance strategies after years of planning. One organization, the Benton Institute for Broadband and Society, estimates that the changes could result in up to a two year additional delay in people getting broadband:

“Mandated changes—if they come from either Congress or the U.S. Department of Commerce—could force states to rerun their entire BEAD sub-grantee selection processes. The resulting delays will cost ISPs across the country hundreds of millions of dollars in time and resources to plan for the new program guidelines and reapply for awards.”

Again, very ironic that Republicans would spend much of the last year complaining about delays in this program, only to introduce massive new delays. And not delays that are actually beneficial to the public, but delays that mostly help their buddies at AT&T/Comcast/Verizon and Elon Musk.

Apparently under the belief he was helping matters, Ezra Klein recently jumped into the broadband debate to make the unoriginal observation that government should make big promises and deliver on them. But his analysis of broadband was simplistically puerile; most of it seemed based on Republican angst, and ignored the real progress made on affordable fiber via ARPA and other initiatives.

Klein also ignored that a major reason BEAD moved slowly was due to corruption and telecom lobbyists trying to weaken and change the bill to their direct benefit (softening speed definitions, weakening map coverage, preventing competitors from getting grants). Corruption is something Klein’s new book tends to downplay as a primary issue of concern, despite its starring role in U.S. dysfunction.

BEAD was never going to win any awards for government efficiency. The bill was passed in 2021, yet states were only just starting to finalize deployment plans. But again there were some good reasons for this; creating a vast coalition of federal and local governments tasked with completely remapping broadband access, then vetting applicants to ensure they could deliver — takes a little time.

The great irony is that most of these delays were the direct result of government not wanting to repeat mistakes in past broadband government subsidy programs. Such as the FCC’s Rural Deployment Opportunity Fund, which was a giant boondoggle under the first Trump administration because the government didn’t do its homework on broadband mapping, or grant applicant credibility.

BEAD’s slower cadence was a direct result of fighting corruption and trying (with mixed results) to do things the right way. It was on the cusp of delivering real-world affordable fiber when Republicans showed up to fix things. By, again, making the resulting, reconstituted program take longer and deliver less. Ingenious. We are truly living in the golden age of populist abundance.

Republican (and Ezra Klein’s) angst over the slow speed of the BEAD broadband grant managed to get the press all hot and bothered for months. I’d wager that this angst curiously won’t be repeated now that pointless new delays were introduced by Republicans to the direct benefit of Elon Musk.