Analysis by WorldTribune Staff, September 20, 2024 Contract With Our Readers
Is Kamala Harris using a modem from 1993 to attempt to deliver high speed Internet to millions of Americans in rural areas?
Either that or she is just badly bungling another Biden administration program she was put in charge of.
While Harris’s incompetence on handling the border crisis has been well-documented, many may not be aware of the Democrat presidential candidate’s rural Internet access debacle.
FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr said in congressional testimony on Sept. 19:
“In 2021, Vice President Harris agreed to lead a $42 billion effort to expand Internet access to millions. It’s been 1,039 days, and no one has been connected—no homes, no businesses, not even a shovel in the ground.”
Carr continued: “It gets worse. No infrastructure will begin until next year at the earliest, and in many cases, not until 2026. This makes it the slowest federal broadband program in recent history.”
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Reason’s Joe Lancaster reported that red tape plays a major part in why the program remains stalled:
Among several examples, the senators noted that NTIA’s BEAD 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.”
The previous year, in a letter to Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, Republican senators warned that the NTIA’s proposed BEAD rollout “creates a complex, nine-step, ‘iterative’ structure and review process that is likely to mire State broadband offices in excessive bureaucracy and delay connecting unserved and underserved Americans as quickly as possible.”
PJ Media’s Stephen Green noted: “These are the same self-inflicted problems plaguing the $50 billion Biden-Harris project to build 500,000 EV charging stations. For those keeping score at home, the administration lobbied Congress for nearly $100 billion on these two infrastructure boondoggles and, so far, we’ve gotten zero new high-speed Internet connections and eight EV charging stations.”
Green added: “Without having to lay any cable at all or get caught up in any red tape, Washington could give rural households a $600 voucher good for a high-speed Starlink satellite transceiver and WiFi router. While we’re spending the big bucks, make the voucher an even $2,000 and include a year of service.
“For that same $42 billion, you could quickly provide a year of high-speed internet to 21 million homes — more than four times the number Biden-Harris promised to help. But where are the opportunities for graft and DEI in that?”
Carr told Congress: “The bottom line, without major reforms, Vice President Harris’s $42 billion program is wired to fail. It’s time to correct course. Get rid of all the extraneous political goals and focus on quickly connecting Americans.”
3 years later, $42 billion Harris plan has added Internet access to zero homes added by Editor Two on
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