CV NEWS FEED // Three years and $42 billion into the Biden administration’s high-speed internet initiative, the plan has failed to deliver broadband to a single American.
“In 2021, the Biden Administration got $42.45 billion from Congress to deploy high-speed Internet to millions of Americans,” Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Commissioner Brendan Carr wrote on X (formerly Twitter) Friday.
“Years later, it has not connected even 1 person with those funds,” the lawyer and government official continued. “In fact, it now says that no construction projects will even start until 2025 at earliest.”
Carr noted that on top of this $42-billion taxpayer-funded program, “the Biden Admin has been layering a partisan political agenda.”
He noted that the administration’s “liberal wish list” includes things such as “[c]limate change mandates, tech biases, [diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)] requirements, favoring government-run networks + more” – things that have “nothing to do with connecting Americans.”
An X user asked Carr what the Biden administration spent the $42 billion on.
“Mostly, the $42.45B is just sitting there,” Carr replied. “Not even one shovel’s worth of dirt has been turned.”
“And the Biden Administration’s policy cuts make clear that we’re barreling toward a broadband blunder,” indicated Carr:
Rate regulation, thumb on the scale for government run networks, technology bias, union preferences plus many more problems = many of the broadband builders that would normally bid to do this work are not expressing interest in taking these dollars.
“It gets worse,” the commissioner added in a follow-up X post on Monday:
While the Biden Admin’s $42.45B plan from 2021 has not resulted in even a single shovel’s worth of dirt being turned, the government in 2022 revoked an award to Starlink that would have delivered high-speed Internet to 642K rural locations
A majority of the FCC – under the leadership of a Biden-appointed chairwoman – made that decision in August 2022.
The move reversed an infrastructure award of $885 million – significantly less costly than the $42 billion Biden administration program.
At the time, Carr dissented, arguing the FCC made the move “without legal justification” and warning that “it will leave rural Americans waiting on the wrong side of the digital divide.”
Starlink is a well-known and highly successful satellite internet network owned and operated by Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
The FCC’s decision to revoke the $885-million award to Starlink came during Musk’s ultimately successful months-long campaign to buy X (then known as Twitter) and remake it into a platform more accepting of non-leftist speech.
>> REPORTS: LEFT-WING GROUP GAMED ALGORITHMS ON X <<
Musk has since emerged as a prominent Biden critic from the technology and business worlds.
Former President Donald Trump appointed Carr, a Republican, to the FCC in 2017. Carr previously served as a general counsel of the FCC and legal advisor to a former commissioner.
