by WorldTribune Staff, June 17, 2024 Contract With Our Readers
In the 2021 infrastructure bill, $42.5 billion was earmarked for the Biden administration to connect Americans with high-speed Internet.
Three years later, Team Biden "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,” FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr wrote on Friday.
“Meanwhile, the Biden Admin has been layering a partisan political agenda on top of this $42.45B program – a liberal wish list that has nothing to do with connecting Americans. Climate change mandates, tech biases, DEI requirements, favoring government-run networks + more,” Carr wrote in a post to X.
When the program was announced, funding was to include more than $1 billion each for 19 states, with remaining states falling below that threshold. Allotments range from $100.7 million for Washington, D.C., to $3.3 billion for Texas.
Joe Biden's handlers sent him out to announced that the program would enable all Americans to have access to high-speed Internet by 2030.
Carr said the so-called Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program, which allocated $42.45 billion to support broadband infrastructure and adoption, "fails to close the 'digital divide,' or the gap between those with high-speed Internet and those without."
Team Biden "is barreling towards a broadband blunder. Congress has appropriated enough money to end the digital divide, but the Biden Administration is squandering the moment by putting partisan political goals above smart policy,” the FCC commissioner explained. “It is doing so through rate regulation, through union, technology, and DEI preferences, and through a thumb on the scale for government run networks. All of this threatens to leave rural communities behind.”
