The media isn’t talking about her role as the Biden Administration’s ‘broadband czar’ for a reason.
Instead of helping to build out American broadband access, Harris has allocated her time and energy to internet DEI programs.
Vice President Kamala Harris hasn’t been the most powerful VP, to put it mildly. But when she’s been tasked with responsibility, the results have been utterly catastrophic. Many are aware of her “border czar” portfolio, but not so much about her continued campaign as the Biden Administration’s “broadband czar.”
As the nation’s first DEI vice president, Kamala Harris demonstrated her unique incompetence from the very beginning of the Biden Administration.
It began on President Biden’s 100th day in office, when, during his first public address before a joint session of Congress, he announced the first major agenda items for the portfolio of his vice president.
President Biden stressed that he wanted to create “jobs connecting every American with high-speed Internet, including 35 percent of the rural America that still doesn’t have it.”
”This is going to help our kids and our businesses succeed in the 21st-century economy,” he continued, before “asking the Vice President to lead this effort, if she would.”
“Of course,” replied the VP to the applause of the audience.
From there, Harris was off to the races, spending the next several months meeting with the powerbrokers in Congress to securing funding for the Biden Administration’s plan to provide broad access to high speed internet.
During her meetings with lawmakers, VP Harris spoke with a sense of urgency, noting “the critical importance of investing in broadband infrastructure” so that Americans could get connected to fast, reliable internet as soon as possible.
“When we connect Americans to affordable and accessible broadband, we are connecting our children to education,” Harris said as part of an address to rally lawmakers to grant the administration the supposedly crucial broadband funding.
“We are connecting our seniors* to telemedicine. We are connecting families to each other. And we connect Americans to economic opportunity,” she added.
She got her wish. In November of 2021, Congress would pass the boondoggle of boondoggles in the ”Bipartisan Infrastructure Law,” which was signed into law by President Biden. The legislation authorized some $1.2 trillion for “transportation and infrastructure” projects. A $42.5 billion carve out was made for VP Harris’s signature project, under the label of a Broadband Equity Access and Deployment Program (BEAD).
Despite the immense funding, the Biden Administration has yet to provide evidence that Americans have secured internet access due to the BEAD program, or that the government has advanced projects in that necessary direction. To this day, not a single customer has been connected to the internet through it, according to FCC commissioner Brendan Carr.
“Years later, it has not connected even 1 person with those funds. In fact, it now says that no construction projects will even start until 2025 at earliest,” he wrote in June on X, and deployed a similar post Monday.
Starlink founder Elon Musk has also taken notice of the BEAD program’s lack of “shovel ready jobs” and connected customers. “This government program is an outrageous waste of taxpayer money and is utterly failing to serve people in need,” he wrote on X last month.
Several major broadband program executives wrote an emergency letter to the Biden Administration last week, asserting that the BEAD program’s rates are “completely unmoored from the economic realities of deploying and operating networks in the highest cost, hardest-to-reach areas that BEAD funding is precisely designed to reach.”
VP Harris, for her role as “Broadband Czar,” has continued her campaign for more internet related project funding, but from a very different rhetorical angle. In a statement last month, she declared that Republicans in Congress have “refused to help us” with their plans to deliver broadband access across America. There was no mention of the $42 billion-plus BEAD program, but Harris did tout grants for a “Digital Equity Plan” and a “State Digital Equity Capacity Grant Program.”
Instead of helping to build out U.S. broadband access, Harris has seemingly pivoted her portfolio to allocating dollars to subsidizing already existing broadband infrastructure, using a DEI hierarchy to determine funding mechanisms.
August 11 will mark 1,000 days since the Biden Administration and their “broadband czar” Kamala Harris received funding for the BEAD program.
