Kamala Harris by Gage Skidmore is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
Vice President Kamala Harris has bounced between a comical number of “point person” roles in the Biden Administration, from border security to voting rights to promoting unions. Few recall that she was also supposed to oversee the broadband rollout from President Biden’s trillion-dollar “infrastructure” bill, which has yet to connect a single home to high-speed broadband after 1,000 days.
Signed into law by President Biden on November 15, 2021, the trillion-dollar Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act has been a major driver of inflation throughout Biden’s term. The bill’s Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program made $42.5 billion available to connect homes and businesses in unserved rural areas to high-speed internet service.
It has been 1,000 days since Biden signed, but under Vice President Harris’s leadership, precisely zero homes have been connected.
That’s right, zero homes connected. It has been more than two and a half years since Biden signed the bill and more than three years since Harris was put in charge of the Administration’s broadband efforts, but not a single new building has internet service.
The program has collapsed under the weight of red tape imposed by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, which is in charge of administering the program. NTIA required states to submit multiple rounds of dense paperwork to even qualify for the funds they were given by Congress and has only recently started approving state plans for how to spend the money. At no point has Harris leaned on them to speed things up in her role as broadband czar.
Nearly three years on and 21 states – accounting for more than 57% of Americans – have yet to be approved. Under Harris’s leadership, the majority of Americans will be lucky if their states’ plans are approved by the third anniversary of the bill becoming law. If the paperwork takes so long, will they ever actually build anything?
The BEAD program also requires that most of the work be completed within five years of the law taking effect, meaning most of the projects to reach rural, unserved areas will blow past that deadline at the current pace. Harris’s leadership or lack thereof on broadband may result in a trillion dollars of inflation with nothing to show for it.
Harris’ new running mate, progressive Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, has his own record on broadband. As governor, Walz signed legislation allowing government-owned networks to compete directly with private ISPs to drive them out of the market.
Government-owned networks, usually owned by cities or counties, do not have to turn a profit and can undersell private sector competitors by subsidizing themselves with taxpayer dollars, driving private businesses out of the market. They then usually scoop up all the orphaned customers and impose government-controlled internet on their local area.
Walz signed legislation repealing a bill that required a supermajority vote by towns to create government-owned networks and another that prohibited them from competing with private sector ISPs.
Whether by mismanagement or socialist boondoggles, the Harris-Walz ticket is sure to be a broadband bust.
Stay tuned to ATR’s Kamalanomics.org for updates.