The ability of the government to waste enormous amounts of money while accomplishing very little never ceases to amaze.
I have been writing about public broadband funding for several years now. My work at the Show-Me Institute has been less focused on the federal expenditures overall and more on how that money would be spent in Missouri. I never liked the idea of a massive federal internet expansion program, although I understand that in certain, very rural parts of the nation it could be beneficial. My aim has been to argue against new, local-government owned internet networks (GONs) in Missouri. GONs are, simply put, terrible.
In 2021, the federal government appropriated $42 billion for broadband expansion. Three years later, how many homes have been connected to the internet with that tax money? According to Brendan Carr, an appointed member of the Federal Communications Commission, zero. That’s right, zero. Three years into the program, and they aren’t even close to doing the actual work to connect people to the internet. Carr writes that the administration has been far more concerned with other things instead of actually connecting people to broadband. The internet expansion focus in on: “Climate change mandates, tech biases, DEI requirements, favoring government-run networks + more.”
The original bill to fund broadband expansion was passed with bipartisan support. But, as often happens, bureaucrats appear to have bent the policy to their own agenda (and possibly the administration’s agenda). In this case, as Carr and others have explained, that means progressive policy aims enacted under cover of program rules instead of legislation that both sides of the aisle were willing to support. The Reason Foundation highlighted one of many examples here:
Among several examples, the senators noted that National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment proposal “requires subgrantees to prioritize certain segments of the workforce, such as ‘individuals with past criminal records’ and ‘justice-impacted […] participants.'” The infrastructure law that authorized the program merely required contractors to be “in compliance with Federal labor and employment laws.”
In May, I published an article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch highlighting some astounding examples of government waste. It looks like I can add broadband expansion to this list.
