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.”
In June, the Trump administration completely overhauled BEAD to remove the DEI and climate mandates, and also ensure that the grants are done on “a technology-neutral basis, and at the right price,” as Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick put it.
The reforms remove all of the climate and DEI mandates, and put all internet technologies – satellite, fixed wireless, and fiber – on a level playing field. The Democrats have cried foul. Ranking Commerce Rep. Frank Pallone (D-NJ) called it a “grift” for satellite.
More recently, 23 House Democrats including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and ranking Telecom subcommittee Democrat Doris Matsui (D-CA) wrote a letter to Secretary Lutnick which read like a press release for the fiber industry, claiming “any objective assessment of the technologies available to provide broadband would conclude that fiber optic technology far exceeds any other in its capability to provide future-proof speeds and network capacity.”
Yet the technology-neutral reforms do not discriminate against fiber, it simply allows it to compete in the market on a level playing field against other technologies. Joe Kane from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation refuted these claims noting the, “mental gymnastics to accuse those who remove special favors to certain industries of ‘corruption’” and further explained that “equal treatment isn’t favoritism; rejecting exorbitantly expensive deployments when comparable service can be had for far less money is good broadband policy, not a betrayal of it.”
With Arielle Roth leading the NTIA and strong support for reforming BEAD from Republican leadership in Congress, it is unlikely the Democratic lobbying for the fiber industry will be taken seriously at the Commerce Department.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship.
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