GoKawiilAt 9PM ET on the night of May 28th, a Blue Origin New Glenn rocket sat on the launchpad at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The craft was in the middle of a hot-fire test awaiting the arrival of Amazon Leo satellites, the first of 24 batches to be shuttled into low Earth orbit for an ambitious satellite internet venture. The effort was backed by hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars, leveraging a Biden-era law meant to address America’s digital divide.
But before the satellites even reached the launch site, Jeff Bezos’ rocket exploded into a massive fireball, its wreckage left smoldering on the ground. It was an unintentionally perfect metaphor for a once-in-a-generation attempt to fix the creaky US broadband system, now a flaming mess melting into a slush fund for billionaires.
Bezos — along with newly minted trillionaire Elon Musk — has become one of the biggest beneficiaries of Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD), a $42.45 billion broadband expansion program passed as part of President Joe Biden’s 2021 “Build Back Better” initiative. BEAD was intended to give long-underserved communities billions of dollars for high-quality, future-proof fiber networks.
But under President Donald Trump and a coalition of MAGA-allied tech moguls, Build Back Better has been transformed into “tear down quickly,” leaving states mired in bureaucracy and delays. Five years later, only a handful of the millions of Americans slated for an internet access upgrade actually got one, and there’s little accountability in sight.
Under Biden, BEAD was meant to prioritize deploying fiber across the US. Bloomberg via Getty Images
Established in November 2021, BEAD was the flagship program addressing a rare bipartisan congressional goal: Identify broadband coverage gaps, then deploy affordable, next-generation internet access across the US by 2030. The program worked in tandem with the $2.75 billion Digital Equity Act to boost digital skills training and the $14 billion Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) that subsidized internet access for low-income households.
Even the nation’s Republican governors were initially ecstatic about BEAD. Then-governor of Arkansas Asa Hutchinson hailed the plan as a “historic investment [that] will help fund states and territories’ core infrastructure priorities.”
The massive program, however, had a slow start. States and the federal government spent the first few years figuring out how to adhere to Congress’ demand to address the country’s historically awful broadband maps, then ensure that taxpayer-funded broadband was deployed equitably in a country with a long history of digital discrimination. For much of the 2024 election season, the newswires were filled with Republican complaints that BEAD deployment was taking too long and had become a classic government boondoggle.
Meanwhile, congressional Republicans — most of whom voted against the infrastructure bill and its companion American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) — sought to undercut BEAD and similar programs. In April 2023, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and a dozen GOP lawmakers sent a letter to former National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) boss Alan Davidson, whose agency administered the program, with a laundry list of complaints.
Republicans deemed the Digital Equity Act, designed to remove discriminatory barriers to widespread internet adoption, too “woke.” And the Republican-controlled Congress severed funding for the ACP, which provided a $30 discount off of monthly internet bills for 23 million low-income households, purportedly to save the public money. (Subsequent studies showed the ACP generated billions more in taxpayer benefits than it cost.)
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