Dem Texas AG Candidate Vows To Investigate Musk’s Starlink Grant Grift

from the grift-upon-grift dept

Last month I wrote a feature for The Verge exploring how Republicans had hijacked the Biden-era infrastructure bill to redirect billions of dollars away from next-generation fiber, and instead funnel it into the pockets of billionaires Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos — in exchange for congested, expensive, satellite broadband service they’d already planned to deploy.

The piece explored in detail how some communities, like several low-income areas of Louisiana, were all set to receive next-generation affordable fiber, before Republicans hijacked the program, redirected those funds to their top donors, then proudly declared “mission accomplished.”

While Republicans like NTIA boss Arielle Roth have tried to claim this hijacking has been a net improvement, the adjustments not only showered billionaire Trump allies with unneeded subsidies, it eliminated all the provisions in the program ensuring the resulting broadband was affordable or deployed equitably. Affordable fiber evenly deployed to everyone was, the public was informed, “woke.”

I’m going to be writing about the impact and reverberations for years.

Dems have, as per brand tradition, mostly flubbed the opportunity to highlight and message around this obvious corruption. There were a few good questions flung at Roth during a recent House telecom hearing (Rep. Troy Carter of Louisiana did a particularly good job pressing Roth), but by and large Dems haven’t capitalized on the opportunity to shame Republicans for their grift parade.

Enter aspiring Democratic Texas AG hopeful (and Dallas state senator) Nathan Johnson, who says he wants to take a closer look at Musk’s grants as part of his anti-corruption platform:

“I am not declaring that corruption was at work in this instance. I am saying that it sure looks like it,” Johnson said in an interview. “Public confidence in the bidding process has been undermined.”

His plan comes after Starlink received 99% of the state grants in a government program designed to improve rural broadband access. Johnson said the company received an estimated $110 million.

It’s not clear how far he’ll get, since the roots of the corruption extend federally to Howard Lutnick, Arielle Roth, and the NTIA. But state broadband offices also had to sign off on the grift and were tasked with doling out grant awards, so we’ll see what paper trails disclose.

Keep in mind: the money Musk and Bezos have received from this $42.5 billion grant program pales to what they could ultimately receive. As unnecessary wars, tariffs, inflation, and additional economic chaos unfolds, a lot of providers and states that planned to deploy multi-gigabit affordable fiber are expected to balk and default on their bids, opening the doors for billions more for Musk and Bezos to fill the gaps with “good enough” satellite service.

It’s worth noting that after redirecting billions to satellite, Republicans proclaimed that they’d “saved” $21 billion or so. There’s now an ongoing battle over what happens to these “non-deployment funds” Congress specifically earmarked for broadband access. There are some clear hints that Trump and friends are eager to pocket it for themselves if they think they can get away with it. Great stuff. Very populist.

As I’ve noted previously, while low-Earth orbit services like Starlink are great for folks completely off the grid (who can afford it), congestion and physics make it ill-suited to meaningfully address the lack of internet-access at scale in denser urban, suburban, or even some rural environments. It’s generally designed to be a niche gap-filling option you use after pushing fiber, cellular, and fixed wireless everywhere; Republicans are treating it like a magic bullet simply because Musk is involved.

As a flood of government-subsidized users jump on the Starlink network, existing congestion problems (see this recent study out of Penn State) are going to get worse, resulting in all sorts of annoying network management approaches (throttling of 4K video) you don’t see on higher-capacity fiber. The company has also been charging users fees of up to $1500 in high-capacity areas.

The problems with this approach will become more and more apparent to taxpayers over the next few years, at which point all the folks responsible will have moved on to other opportunistic grifts. It might be nice if Democrats aspiring for higher office kept corruption in the spotlight and remained laser-focused on accountability. It’s not like there’s a shortage of very clear targets of opportunity.

Filed Under: corruption, elon musk, fiber, grants, infrastructure bill, leo satellite, telecom

Companies: spacex, starlink