https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/05/bidens-rural-broadband-push-is-a-slow-motion-train-wreck/
Biden’s Rural Broadband Push Is a Slow-Motion Train Wreck
May 4th, 2024
By Michael O’Rielly
Two years after the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) committed $7.5 billion toward Joe Biden’s goal of 500,000 new electric vehicle (EV) charging stations, his administration has built a whopping seven. Not 7,000. Just seven. But even that “painfully slow rollout” is starting to look like a land speed record compared with the slow-motion train wreck derailing the administration’s rural broadband promises.
Alongside its funding for EV chargers, the IIJA also committed a staggering $42 billion for the even tougher challenge of bringing high-speed internet access within reach of every American household. Now, both efforts are now floundering for the same reason: the Biden appointees holding the purse strings seem more interested in advancing ideological agendas than in delivering on Congress’s bipartisan mandate to Build, Build, Build. Faced with a choice between appeasing unions and accelerating construction, Biden’s Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) appointees chose to suffocate the EV-charging program with arbitrary labor mandates not found anywhere in the law Congress passed. Now they look on bewildered wondering why their program has become a punchline.
Meanwhile, on the rural broadband front, the Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) has decided to openly defy Congress by launching a quixotic crusade to mandate a specific price on the service plans that participating broadband providers must offer low-income customers. Never mind that the IIJA explicitly forbids broadband price regulation, or that Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo promised Congress that her team would never force states to dictate prices. NTIA has now fully backtracked on that commitment — caving to activists’ demands for price controls, holding back funds from any state that dares questions the legality of those demands, and spinning pliant journalists with the fiction that unlawful price caps were always an integral part of Congress’s plan.
In truth, NTIA’s price control demands are directly undermining the goal of universal broadband, in two critical ways.
First, by choosing this hill to die on, NTIA is adding months of delays by ensnaring itself in entirely avoidable fights with state broadband offices. The infrastructure law requires each state to submit to NTIA for approval a plan for this federal funding. Recognizing the law’s clear prohibition on price regulation, Virginia, Florida, and other states have resisted NTIA’s arm-twisting to mandate specific price points in their state plans. NTIA bureaucrats have petulantly responded by refusing to sign off on those states’ plans and refusing to release their funding to get started on network expansion projects. In fact, 30 months after the IIJA’s passage, NTIA has approved only four state broadband expansion plans — an infuriating display of bureaucratic malaise that makes the FHWA’s EV rollout look positively speedy by comparison.
But even if NTIA “succeeds” in unlawfully bending states to its will, that would quickly prove a pyrrhic victory. After all, Congress’s prohibition on price controls was not an oversight but rather an intentional recognition that price regulation would repel the private investment crucial to making the IIJA’s rural broadband goals a success.
Rural network-construction projects are wildly expensive, aiming to connect lightly populated areas with relatively few potential customers to offset the cost. IIJA-grant subsidies will help make these projects economically feasible — but every added mandate, restriction, and bureaucratic demand that NTIA layers onto states’ grant programs tilts the economic balance back in the wrong direction. If you push too far, the broadband providers estimating the investment risks may soon decide that it’s not worth it even to apply for funding.
That would leave rural communities with fewer interested participants, including inexperienced internet providers better at making promises than delivering world-class networks. Some $42 billion could go out the door with relatively little show for it — a supersized sequel to the abysmal results produced by Obama-era rural broadband boondoggles.
The infrastructure bill was a historic, bipartisan breakthrough, with pluses and minuses. But the bill’s broadband promise and potential will go up in smoke if the Biden administration doesn’t restrain its ideological impulses to steal defeat from the jaws of victory.
Michael O’Rielly served as an FCC commissioner from 2013 to 2020.
