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Trump Is Changing the Rural Broadband Rules. Guess Who May Benefit?
“We’re going to provide affordable high-speed internet for every American—rural, urban, suburban, and tribal communities,” said Joe Biden in his State of the Union address in 2022, referring to the infrastructure law he had signed the previous November. He bragged about it again in the 2023 SOTU, and the one in 2024.
In fact, while the infrastructure law created the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment Program, or BEAD, and seeded it with a whopping $42.5 billion to bring high-speed internet to every American household that didn’t have it, three years later it has not yet connected a single home. Big Democratic spending bills, such as the Recovery Act under Barack Obama and the American Rescue Plan signed just after Joe Biden took office, included substantial broadband funding as well, but it was never enough to get high-speed internet to everyone in the country. To be fair, few could have anticipated the sheer malevolence of this administration—or the possibility that both Democrats and Republicans would agree on the necessity of a program like BEAD, have differences that are real but manageable, then watch while the needs of millions of families and communities are pushed aside so Elon Musk can get a publicly funded windfall.
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