Carr Slams BEAD Implementation; Agrees With Harris on Need for Speed

FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr again took aim at how the Biden administration and NTIA have implemented the $42.5 billion broadband equity, access and deployment (BEAD) program, a concern Republicans on Capitol Hill have amplified (see 2409190063). BEAD is “a program worth fighting for,” but it must change, Carr said Friday during an American Enterprise Institute webinar.

“I have sort of not been too shy to express my concerns about where we are with this particular program,” Carr said. The program "has gone off the rails.”

Carr criticized Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic candidate for president, noting she was tasked with implementing BEAD, and on “day 1,047” of the program “we have connected exactly zero people.” Carr said he supports BEAD protections against waste, fraud and abuse, but construction should have started. “You don’t want to shove the money out the door immediately,” he conceded.

But Carr also acknowledged Harris' comments last week at the Economic Club of Pittsburgh that it takes too long to build things in the U.S. “I couldn’t agree more, particularly when it comes to this one particular program,” he said. In Pittsburgh, Harris said, “Projects take too long to go from concept to reality; it happens in blue states, and it happens in red states.”

The BEAD program should be streamlined, Carr said, including eliminating provisions promoting diversity, equity and inclusion and fighting climate change. Republicans have made both those points on a broader level. Carr also called for elimination of “technology bias,” making room for 5G, fixed wireless and satellite connections. “Starlink is a great example now, but Kuiper is going to be nipping at their heels in the not too distant future,” he said. Fixed wireless “is doing great work connecting rural communities.”

Carr said most deployments probably should be based on fiber, a focus of the current program: “It’s a really good technology, [a] high-speed technology; not sure if it’s future-proof per se, but it’s definitely a durable, good, long-term solution.”

“Let’s go tech neutral, fiber where it makes sense,” Carr said: “We probably shouldn’t be [bringing] ... fiber to places where it costs $200,000 a location. Let’s look at fixed wireless. Let’s look at Starlink.”

Launch of the affordable connectivity program moved very quickly during COVID-19 and enjoyed bipartisan support, Carr noted. But FCC survey data shows that just 15% of households that got ACP said they would lack internet access without the program. “We didn’t quite have it tailored exactly right,” he said. Companies including AT&T and Comcast have acknowledged that many ACP subscribers were previously paying subscribers and are again, he said. “That’s not to say that there’s not a need out there.”

Carr defended the $20 billion rural digital opportunity fund, launched during the Trump administration, noting that unlike BEAD, RDOF wasn’t used to overbuild existing networks. Commerce Department guidelines on BEAD say up to 20% of locations in a project area can already be served, including by fiber, he said. The BEAD program also doesn’t count as served areas with fixed wireless access relying on unlicensed spectrum. Any concern about overbuilding during RDOF “doesn’t make a lot of sense when you look at where the BEAD program itself is at.”

“When it comes to broadband programs," said Mark Jamison, AEI nonresident senior fellow, "we keep repeating the mistakes of the past.” Jamison interviewed Carr during the webinar.

“We know how to evaluate things,” but “evaluation isn’t the same thing as compliance,” said Technology Policy Institute President Scott Wallsten during an AEI panel discussion that followed. “Policy and policymakers confuse those two things all the time,” he said. Compliance ensures against fraud and that a company does what it promised. “And that’s important.”

“Evaluation," Wallsten said, "is whether the program itself actually made a difference." If an ISP connects 1,000 locations that would have been connected anyway, “then the program did nothing,” he said: “We never, ever, focus on that, or very rarely, and we don’t seem to have a political appetite to do it.”

Yet politicians benefit in those situations as “money flows to their districts,” Wallsten said. Companies gain because they receive “free money” from the government. And technology providers “lobby hard to make sure that their technology is the preferred one.” All that makes it difficult to evaluate whether a program was effective. Consumers are generally ignored, he added.