Since President Biden unveiled his $2 trillion “American Jobs Plan” last week, the debate in Washington has focused on an existential — or at least definitional — question. What is infrastructure? As many observers have pointed out, the lion’s share of the plan has nothing to do with infrastructure. One exception I would argue is the $100 billion it proposes for broadband. That clears the definitional hurdle. The problem is the plan itself.
The Biden administration’s broadband plan tracks many of the ideas contained in the $94 billion “Internet for all” infrastructure bill that congressional Democrats introduced earlier this year. And that is not a good thing.
At the outset, their efforts ignore the billions upon billions of dollars that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) already has in the pipeline for expanding Internet service.
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Just last year, the FCC committed $9.2 billion to support the buildout of high-speed service to millions of unserved families over the next ten years. At the same time, the agency budgeted up to $11.2 billion to extend broadband to even more Americans through a second phase of that initiative. Earlier this year, the FCC stood up a new $3.2 billion program to subsidize Internet service for low-income Americans. And just last month, Congress provided the FCC with an additional $7.1 billion to support Internet connections for students. The FCC will also distribute up to $9 billion over the next ten years to bring 5G to rural America plus an additional $1.9 billion for carriers to upgrade their insecure infrastructure.
So how much of this funding has gone out the door? None. Not one penny from this $40 billion tranche has been spent.
Think about that. During the 2020 campaign, President Biden pledged a moon shot $20 billion for rural broadband. We now have double that amount waiting to be distributed. Yet Democrats are poised to pour a hundred billion dollars on top of those billions upon billions of unspent dollars.
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Originally Posted by FredK
