Join the Fight and Support Revolver Now… Donate…

Sign up for our email list… Stay on the bleeding edge… 

The Senate recently confirmed Ted Cruz’s top telecom staffer, Arielle Roth, to run the National Telecommunications and Information Administration at the Department of Commerce, after all Democrats but John Fetterman voted against her. The NTIA is a relatively unknown government agency that advises the president on telecom issues separately from the FCC. The Biden administration gave it far more power in 2021 when it entrusted it with approving $42.5 billion to the states as part of the infrastructure bill to provide broadband buildout in underserved and rural areas as part of the Broadband Equity and Deployment (BEAD) program.

Like almost all of Biden’s “infrastructure,” BEAD was a giveaway to woke special interests that failed to deliver anything of value to Americans. As Senator Cruz noted, the Biden NTIA had an “extreme technology bias in defining ‘priority broadband projects’… imposition of statutorily-prohibited rate regulation; unionized workforce and DEI labor requirements; [and] climate change assessment.”

Cruz referred to “priority broadband” to describe a legal term in the statute that the Biden Administration defined only to grant funding to fiber and other wired communication, but not Low Earth Orbit or LEO Satellite (such as SpaceX’s Starlink or Amazon’s Kuiper). This policy had nothing to do with the speed or quality of the internet—in fact, the Biden NTIA counted DSL, a 1990s technology, as reliable high-speed internet.

Biden sought to give a massive subsidy to the cable and fiber industry, which planned on billing the taxpayers tens, and in some cases, hundreds of thousands of dollars per household they connected to the internet. The Democrats had political reasons to support fiber internet and harm LEO satellite. Biden launched his 2020 presidential campaign with Cable executives. Elon Musk first began criticizing Biden and pushing for free speech on Twitter when the NTIA first made these discriminatory rules.

Combined with the mandates, the program was a total failure. As Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick noted, the “prior Administration’s woke mandates, favoritism towards certain technologies, and burdensome regulations, the program has not connected a single person to the internet and is in dire need of a readjustment.”

In June, the Trump NTIA reformed the project by eliminating all the wasteful woke mandates and properly defining “priority broadband” on a technology-neutral basis. In other words, fiber, fixed wireless, or LEO satellite internet will be treated equally so long as they meet the requirements for high speed and reliability.

In response, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and all other Democrats in the House Commerce Committee wrote a letter to Secretary Lutnick falsely claiming that fiber “is the only technology that is consistent with the statutory definition of ‘priority broadband project,’ which gives precedence to technologies that are the most reliable, scalable, and capable of meeting evolving connectivity needs.”

Yet as noted, the original statute, like Trump’s revised rules, defined priority broadband based on speed and performance, not by technology.

One can only wonder why anti-capitalists like AOC are so invested in propping up Big Telecom companies. Whether it is doing bidding for Democratic donors and lobbyists, punishing Elon Musk, or reflexively opposing reforms by the Trump Administration, any attempts to stifle the technology-neutral principles will lead to more waste and delays.

Despite the Left’s best efforts, the Trump NTIA is finally making the BEAD program deliver to the underserved Americans whom the Democrats claimed they sought to connect to the internet.

Annual Ad-Free Subscription… Join the Fight and Support Revolver Now…

Check out the new merch! — Donate…

Sign up for our email list… Stay on the bleeding edge… 

NEWSFEED — FOLLOW ON X — GAB — GETTR — TRUTH SOCIAL — BLUESKY