Elon Musk’s Starlink is muscling in on Joe Biden’s rural internet initiative. “What rural internet initiative?” you might ask. Good question.
The Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program was introduced as part of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 to bring internet access to America’s unconnected households, 80 percent of which are in rural areas. Administration officials likened the program to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1936 Rural Electrification Act, a fundamental part of the New Deal that delivered electricity to rural America. Like the electrification program before it, BEAD’s purpose was to bridge critical infrastructure gaps through massive public investment and create good jobs in the process.
A major difference, however, is that Roosevelt was one of the most publicly visible presidents in American history, ceaselessly crisscrossing the country and famously using emerging media to promote, explain, and foster buy-in for New Deal policies. Biden, by contrast, was profoundly press averse. By his fourth year in office, Biden had given just 164 press conferences and interviews, compared to Barack Obama’s 570 and Donald Trump’s 468.
Biden was largely absent from the national stage, and so too were his most ambitious efforts. Consequently, rural Americans have little notion of Biden’s broadband initiative, nor much sense of what they stand to lose. This lack of recognition has made it easy for Musk, with minimal public outcry, to convince the Trump administration’s Commerce Department to revise the BEAD Program to make it “technology neutral,” meaning more inclusive of satellite internet services rather than building fiber-optic broadband — satellite internet services such as those provided by…
Auteur: Meagan Day
