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Inside Biden’s Billion-Dollar Broadband Boondoggle
Inside Biden’s Billion-Dollar Broadband Boondoggle
President Joe Biden announces a $42 billion investment in high-speed internet infrastructure on June 26, 2023 in Washington, D.C. (Chip Somodevilla via Getty Images)
The president promised to connect rural Americans to the internet. But ‘woke leftist policies’ have helped prevent the $42 billion scheme from servicing a single customer.
By Madeleine Rowley
01.15.25 — U.S. Politics
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The Free Press
The Free Press
Inside Biden’s Billion-Dollar Broadband Boondoggle

Steve Beining, 55, lives in a two-bedroom cabin on 140 acres in the woods of northwest Wisconsin. He bought the place from his parents during the Covid-19 pandemic, trading in a cramped apartment near the city of Appleton for endless rows of evergreens. There is only one problem: Beining, a software engineer, doesn’t have reliable internet service.

“I have to share my screen a lot for work, and I was having major latency issues,” said Beining, referring to slow loading times. The best answer would be broadband, a technology that is hard to find in many remote parts of the country.

Four years ago, the Biden administration promised 25 million people in rural America, like Beining, that they would get reliable access to the internet. But so far, the $42 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program has yet to hook up a single customer.

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Madeleine Rowley

Madeleine Rowley is an investigative reporter covering immigration, financial corruption, and politics. She is a 2023-2024 Manhattan Institute Logos Fellow with previous bylines in The Free Press, City Journal, and Public. As a U.S. Army spouse for almost a decade, she's lived in six states and spent two years in Jerusalem, Israel. She currently resides on the East Coast with her husband and daughter.

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