Who’s to Blame for BEAD? Join in an Open Discussion

Why did implementing the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment Program take so long?

For Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, authors of the book Abundance and leaders of the movement by the same name, the answer is clear. Democrat’s obsession with complex regulations and their desire to pack all of their policy priorities in a single piece of legislation–what the authors term “everything bagelism”–spelled doom for the BEAD program from the start.

Klein’s excoriation of the program’s complex, 14-step process on Jon Stewart’s weekly show delighted its host, and drew criticism from former Biden administration officials. It also caught the attention of Elon Musk, who reposted a clip of Klein’s critiques that was viewed over 28 million times on X.  According to Klein and Thompson, BEAD would have been better served by stripping extraneous policy requirements from the program and focusing on getting money out the door quickly.

Paul Glastris and Kainoa Lowman disagree. In a 7,700 word Washington Monthly article detailing BEAD’s failures, the authors claimed that the fault lies with telecommunications monopolies and their (mostly Republican) allies in Congress. 

In their telling, Biden’s initial $100 billion broadband deployment proposal represented “an existential threat” to incumbent providers. To counter that threat, providers lobbied their allies in Congress to change Biden’s initial proposal that would have established a centralized, nationwide program administered by the federal government, to a decentralized one run out of state broadband offices. 

This change gave incumbent providers more sway over the future of the program, as a single state broadband office is significantly less powerful, and thus far more susceptible to lobbying, than the Federal government. 

Though consumer groups also initially supported the move, not wanting to see a repeat of the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund, the downside was that the divvying up of the money amongst the states would take much longer and require far more detailed broadband maps than were available. Because Republicans were worried about “overbuilding” incumbent networks, they insisted that the National Telecommunications and Information Administration create new, detailed maps before distributing any funds. It was the creation of these maps, not extraneous regulations, that the authors claimed caused the BEAD slowdown. 

“Doing an entire regional network, you know, diagramming and all that, is easily 90 percent of the time,” Sascha Meinrath, a Penn State telecommunications professor who the authors quoted in their piece, said. “Having done many of these successfully, I can tell you that if that’s the case [that a state is struggling to comply with the everything-bagel requirements], they’re definitely doing it wrong.” 

Sparked a broader debate about structuring broadband policy

Whatever one thinks of the Washington Monthly piece, it has undoubtedly sparked a broader debate about how broadband policy should be structured. The Free State Foundation criticized the piece on Monday, with Andrew Long arguing that Glastris and Lowman’s piece missed the point of the BEAD program.

“What the authors willfully choose to ignore is that the stated goal of the [Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act] was to subsidize the prohibitively high price tag to connect primarily rural locations still ‘unserved’ – not to use taxpayer dollars to compete with these existing, privately funded networks, which of course would disincentivize future investment,” Long said.

Broadband Breakfast’s own Ted Hearn was also snarky in a Policyband post: “Left-leaning Washington Monthly just burned 7,700 words on a revisionist history of the failures of the $42.45 billion BEAD program under President Biden. Did Biden’s sainted NTIA leaders Alan Davidson or Evan Feinman skin a knee along the way? Of course not.”

Hearn pointed out that the Washington Monthly piece hardly touched on Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s changes to the BEAD program, despite those changes aligning more closely with Biden’s original top-down approach. Hearn argued that since many Congressional Democrats opposed Lutnick’s revisions, praising them would ”have been inconvenient for Glastris and Lowman.”

Christopher Mitchell, Director of the Community Broadband Networks Initiative with the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, told Broadband Breakfast that the state-administered BEAD program was working. He also criticized the influence that large telecommunication providers have on public policy.

“The Trump Administration and other critics of transformational investment in rural regions refuse to reckon with the evidence that states made BEAD successful - they came in under budget with mostly fiber optic projects. It was working,” he said. “It is remarkable how policy conversations in Washington D.C. ignore the market reality that hundreds of millions of American families face - Internet access that is too expensive from monopolies that people mostly hate doing business with,” he continued. “Those monopolies use their power to twist the rules and the federal and state level to their advantage. These are not controversial statements outside the beltway.”