Richmond Times-Dispatch

Commentary: Biden administration is holding Virginia hostage

Virginia’s much-needed rural broadband expansion is being threatened by the Biden administration’s back-door attempt to force a harmful rate regulation mandate on the commonwealth that Congress has expressly forbidden.

When Congress passed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, it dedicated $42.45 billion to build out broadband to unserved areas of the country. This provision, called the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) Program, would allocate a much-needed $1.482 billion for broadband buildouts in Virginia to cover an estimated 162,000 locations without broadband access.

As a former commissioner at the Federal Communications Commission and nearly 20-year congressional staffer, including years working for the late U.S. Rep. (and former Richmond Mayor) Tom Bliley, I have traveled throughout the commonwealth for decades hearing exactly what members of the state Senate and House of Delegates have been hearing — Virginians in outlying and even in closer-in “gap” areas need access to fast, reliable broadband.

The good news is that great progress is within reach. Congress has allocated the money, and Virginia is perhaps the best-equipped state in the nation to efficiently allocate those funds. Virginia was an early pioneer in creating and expertly staffing the Virginia Office of Broadband, which has done yeoman’s work, and targeting unserved areas with its own state money.

The bad news is that President Joe Biden’s Commerce Department — which houses the agency in charge of distributing the infrastructure bill's funds — is throwing needless bureaucratic obstacles in the way of progress.

To put it generously, Biden’s commerce secretary, Gina Raimondo, is holding hostage billions in needed broadband funding in order to force Virginia and other states to succumb to an unnecessary, intellectually bankrupt policy of rate regulation. Gov. Glenn Youngkin is rightly pushing back against Biden’s back-door rate regulation ploy, but without a change in the Biden administration’s mindset, Virginia citizens lacking broadband might well face years of delays and needless increases in broadband buildout costs.

Virginia promptly filed all the necessary paperwork ahead of every other state and territory but one. But Virginia’s application suddenly became stuck in bureaucratic quicksand over one issue and one issue alone — the Biden administration’s insistence that Virginia establish a low-cost, regulated broadband service rate, a regulatory measure that is expressly forbidden by the infrastructure bill that established the BEAD program in the first place.

The infrastructure bill clearly states that "(n)othing in this title may be construed to authorize the Assistant Secretary or the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) to regulate the rates charged for broadband service."

Answering NTIA’s attempt to bully Virginia into this back-door rate regulation scheme, the Virginia Office of Broadband read this provision right back to them. But Biden’s agency heads persist in defying the law Congress passed in order to establish what amounts to a “government-approved low-cost broadband rate” for the nation, and show other states that Washington, D.C., can bully their way into a rate regulation regime, despite the law, by making an example out of the commonwealth of Virginia.

No matter what Washington, D.C., may want to call it, setting a price is rate regulation. And by holding up Virginia’s application, the Biden administration is not only violating Congress’ bipartisan infrastructure law, but cynically trying to bend Virginians to the administration’s will.

The Biden administration is cynically threatening to let Virginia’s allocated funding sit idle — or worse, be diverted elsewhere.

Gov. Youngkin and the Virginia Office of Broadband are doing the right thing by holding the Biden administration to the law Congress passed and sticking to the solid plans they have drawn up to bring broadband service to Virginia’s unserved areas.

Virginians deserve better than to have last-minute bureaucratic obstacles thrown up in front of their long-needed broadband expansion.

Hopefully, President Biden’s team will see the wisdom of Virginia’s clear vision of expanding broadband and release the money Congress has allocated. Absent that, perhaps the Biden administration will see the citizens from a politically important battleground state rejecting its politicized bureaucracy at the ballot box.

Michael O’Rielly served as a commissioner at the Federal Communications Commission from 2013 through 2020.