Hey Ezra Klein: Why Did You Stop Talking About Broadband And The Infrastructure Bill?

from the you-got-boondoggle-in-my-boondoggle dept

Last fall, Ezra Klein was getting a lot of attention for his book Abundance, which basically argued that American had become bureaucracy-obsessed and fallen out of love with building things. I thought it was mostly simplistic cack, downplaying or ignoring the fact that the U.S. government has become so blisteringly corrupt, it clearly no longer functions in the public interest.

As a longtime telecom beat reporter I was particularly struck by Klein’s chapter on broadband, which mostly seemed to amplify Republican attacks. One of Klein’s biggest targets was the infrastructure bill and Broadband, Equity, Deployment, and Access (BEAD) program, which was part of the 2021 infrastructure bill, and set aside $42.5 billion for improved internet access.

BEAD was never going to be a poster child for government efficiency. But as I noted at the time, Klein’s criticism of the program was bizarre and simplistic, downplayed why the program was taking so long (we had to remap the entirety of U.S. internet access, for one), and ignored how other legislation that same year (like ARPA) was delivering much of the abundance Klein claimed to be looking for.

I could tell from reading Klein’s Abundance chapter on broadband that he didn’t spend much time talking to telecom policy experts. After Klein’s attacks made inroads on the podcast circuit (including on Jon Stewart’s) they were then picked up again by right wing media, further perpetuating the idea that BEAD was a completely useless boondoggle:

I bring it up because a little more than a year later and this BEAD program really is now a boondoggle under Trumpism, as Sean Gonsalves and I explored in a new feature over at The Verge.

Republicans, it should be noted, voted against the infrastructure bill and ARPA, but can still routinely be found taking credit for the improvements they opposed.

Last election season, Republicans ran on the idea that they’d reshape BEAD and trim the fat. Instead they’ve stripped away all oversight, eliminated any requirements that taxpayer-funded broadband be affordable or equitably deployed, and gone out of their way to redirect money away from future-proof fiber toward Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos low-Earth-orbit satellite broadband networks.

Republicans — and the Joe Rogan infotainment universe — are positively convinced that Starlink is akin to magic. So they’ve decided to throw billions of taxpayer money at Bezos and Musk in exchange for slower, more expensive, congested low-Earth orbit satellite connectivity that chips away at the ozone layer. It’s worth noting they’re being given billions for service that already exists and was already set to be deployed.

In our Verge piece, we talked to minority communities in Louisiana who were slated to get fiber upgrades, but are now being shoveled toward Starlink service (that already existed) thanks to Republican BEAD changes. They are very aware they’re now getting the short-end of the stick:

“The most frustrating part is that it was a zero dollar investment in infrastructure,” Wills told The Verge. “Nothing fundamentally changed. People with Starlink are going to just get mailed a box and many won’t be able to install it. And we still won’t have anybody really served,” leaving the community with “no growth in our economic potential.”

“No money will stay here,” he said. “No jobs will be created from this — no installation jobs, zero construction jobs, or even any small stimulus.”

Republicans are then claiming they “saved taxpayers money” by throwing money at billionaires for satellite broadband they already planned to deploy. States and the Trump administration are now bickering over these $20 billion in “non deployment funds.” Congress said this money had to be used for broadband access; but the law under Trumpism is very clearly optional. It’s a giant mess.

All of this corrupt retooling has caused endless new delays, pushing real-world deployments out by another year or two. As of this writing, the $42.5 billion program has only provided new (fixed wireless) connections to a handful of homes in Louisiana and Nebraska (the Trump administration tried to use this as a press op highlighting how amazingly successful their revamp has been).

Due to the higher costs of deployment created by stupid tariffs and pointless wars, many additional fiber deployment bids originally supposed to be funded by BEAD are likely to go into default and be cancelled, opening up the possibility of Musk and Bezos getting billions more in taxpayer subsidies. It’s expected that this whole mess will get significantly uglier later this year.

Curiously, Ezra Klein hasn’t made a peep. All the press coverage last election season about how BEAD was a boondoggle is nowhere to be found now that the program is a bigger boondoggle than ever. And it’s a bigger boondoggle than ever because the U.S. is too corrupt to function, something that needs to be addressed (and candidly acknowledged by our press) before we can even begin to sniff “abundance.”

I’ve always felt that the abundance movement was an influence campaign by affluent centrists to pre-empt genuine populist progressive reform as the response to authoritarianism. The abundance movement always struck me as Clinton-era vibes-based deregulatory corporatism with a new coat of paint; something seemingly supported by its proponents’ curiously limited attention span.

Filed Under: abundance, bead, broadband, donald trump, elon musk, ezra klein, high speed internet, internet access, jeff bezos, ntia, taxpayers, telecom

Companies: spacex, starlink