Let's Cut Some Spending: The $42.5 Billion Internet Program That Connected Zero People
- ForAmerica
- 1 minute ago
- 2 min read
In our Let's Cut Some Spending series, ForAmerica chronicles the many ways Washington wastes YOUR tax dollars - and today's entry might be the gold standard.
Today's offering: the federal government's $42.5 billion rural broadband program that, years in, has connected a grand total of zero new households to the internet.
The program is BEAD, the Biden-era Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment initiative, sold to the public as the biggest push in American history to get every household online. Instead, according to a new writeup from The Daily Signal, the entire $42.5 billion sat mostly tangled in red tape, funding planning documents, studies, and bureaucratic overhead instead of a single mile of new fiber or a single new customer.
"$42.5 billion was dedicated to a federal broadband initiative that failed to connect a single person."
And it's not an isolated case. The same reporting flags $521 million spent standing up electric vehicle charging stations under a separate program, which promised 9,200 chargers nationwide and delivered 214. The EPA, meanwhile, handed out grants so loosely that its own watchdogs found roughly $22.6 billion, about 60% of the agency's grant funding, sitting at high risk of fraud and abuse because basic paperwork and progress reports never got completed.
There's a fix in the works. The Office of Management and Budget has proposed new rules that would put political appointees, people actually accountable to voters, in charge of approving and cutting off grants, rather than leaving billions on autopilot inside the bureaucracy. Whatever you think of the politics around it, the baseline math is hard to argue with: $42.5 billion and zero new hookups is not a success story by any definition, and it shouldn't take an act of Congress to notice that sooner.
$42.5 billion could have funded roughly 1.4 million four-year in-state college scholarships. Instead, it funded paperwork.
Source: The Daily Signal