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President Trump has made ending DEI programs and wasteful spending one of the priorities of his second administration. One of the worst offenders the administration cut down was the Broadband Equity and Deployment (BEAD) program, a $42.5 billion liberal boondoggle created by Joe Biden meant to subsidize high-speed internet in underserved and predominantly rural areas.

After the Trump Commerce Department salvaged this program to help connect Americans, the telecom lobby is now working with state governments to undermine the administration’s reforms.

As Revolver previously reported, BEAD was a giveaway to DEI and climate special interests that failed to deliver internet to a single American, while giving fiber and telecom companies tens and even hundreds of thousands of dollars to connect a single household. Senate Commerce Chair Ted Cruz, Trump’s FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick have all called out the program for these failures, which were tied to the Biden Administration’s insistence on only giving subsidies to fiber over satellite. While in many remote areas, satellite could provide internet for under $1,000 overnight, the Biden administration took years and allocated billions of dollars to failed fiber projects because they wanted to punish Elon Musk.

Trump’s NTIA (National Telecommunications Information Agency) reformed this initiative in June with new broadband rules that eliminated the climate and DEI mandates while creating a technology-neutral framework.

Despite these changes, some states are still trying to carry out BEAD’s DEI priorities. One of these states is Virginia. Old Dominion wants to discriminate against Starlink in favor of fiber options. The Biden administration and woke officials felt this focus better served their agenda.

SpaceX called out this plan for limiting consumer options to suit the whims of liberal bureaucrats and ignoring the NTIA’s directives. In a letter to the Department of Housing and Community Development, noting: “Simply put, Virginia has put its heavy thumb on the scale in favor of expensive, slow-to-build fiber bias over speedy, low-cost, and technology-neutral competition,” It added, “Virginia must immediately revise its final proposal to consider applications received in line with program rules appropriately. Alternatively, NTIA must deny Virginia’s final proposal.”

Far-left anti-free speech advocates like Gigi Sohn, Biden’s failed pick for the Federal Communications Commission, have praised Virginia’s supposedly Republican officials for having “done an incredible job in record time to develop a proposal that follows the letter and spirit of the new BEAD requirements. It is technology-neutral and also delivers the best broadband to the vast majority of Virginians.”

She accused SpaceX of trying to “bully” Old Dominion and push other states to pursue policies that ditch the Left’s broadband agenda. In a series of LinkedIn posts, she praised Virginia’s plan, ostensibly implemented by conservative Republican government, noting that they have “done an incredible job in record time to develop a proposal that follows the letter and spirit of the new BEAD requirements. It is technology neutral and also delivers the best broadband to the vast majority of Virginians.” She attacked Starlink’s comments as “one of the most intemperate filings I’ve ever seen in the telecom policy space.”

Gigi Sohn lacks the credibility to opine on which projects align with the Trump administration’s reforms. No one embodies Biden’s anti-free speech telecom agenda more than her. Sohn was so radical that even the Democratic-controlled Senate refused to confirm her. As Revolver reported in 2022, Sohn was a telecom fellow for Open Society Foundations, the grantmaking network funded by George Soros. With Soros’s money, she helped found Public Knowledge. The far-left telecom group called for OAN to be deplatformed after January 6. Sohn herself endorsed a congressional inquisition over OAN, which doubled as a far-left effort to use the threat of government retaliation to pressure cable companies to drop conservative channels. In 2018, she called on the FCC to look into revoking the broadcast license for the Sinclair Broadcast Group, explicitly because of the company’s politics.”

After the Senate rejected her FCC nomination, Sohn launched the American Association of Public Broadband, a lobbying fund for government-run broadband, which has not publicly disclosed its members. These woke telecom companies are trying to continue to grift off the Biden gravy train, which Trump is cutting off.

There’s no reason she would praise the Republican government for fulfilling the Trump administration’s anti-DEI cost-saving reforms. Fortunately, under Trump’s leadership, the Commerce Department is not going to fall for these bad-faith attempts to circumvent his policies.

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