Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) and Senate Republicans on Thursday called for the Trump administration to remove “woke,” climate change, and extraneous regulations that hampered the expansion of broadband internet.
Thune and the Senate Commerce Committee Republicans wrote to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick as the secretary has committed to a “rigorous review” of the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program, a $42.5 billion program tucked within the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.
03.27.25 Thune Letter to Lutnick Re BEAD by Breitbart News on Scribd
The program sought to dramatically expand Americans’ access to broadband internet; however, as congressional Republicans and Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Brendan Carr have pointed out, the program has largely failed to connect Americans with internet.
Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX), the chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Roger Wicker (R-MS), Deb Fischer (R-NE), Jerry Moran (R-KS), Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), Todd Young (R-IA), Ted Budd (R-NC), Eric Schmitt (R-MO), John Curtis (R-UT), Bernie Moreno (R-OH), Tim Sheehy (R-MT), and Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) joined Thune on the letter.
Thune and Senate Republicans last September hounded then-Vice President Kamala Harris’s failed leadership as the “broadband czar,” saying it was as disastrous a job as the “border czar.”
Talk about the passage of time
— Brendan Carr (@BrendanCarrFCC) July 19, 2024
It has now been 9️⃣7️⃣7️⃣ days since the Biden-Harris Administration passed its $42 billion plan for expanding Internet
0️⃣ Americans have been connected
0️⃣ Shovels worth of dirt turned
Is that “the passage of time” that VP Harris had in mind ? pic.twitter.com/iMRtHlyy8Q
The Senate Republicans asked that Lutnick remove the extraneous regulations that are holding back the expansion of broadband internet across the country.
“In particular, we encourage you to remove the BEAD program’s restrictive labor requirements that disadvantage rural communities, provisions favoring government-owned networks over private investment, and guidelines that prioritize certain technologies over others and clearly contradict congressional pursuit of tech-neutrality,” the Senate Republicans wrote to the Commerce secretary.
The Republican senators noted that the former director of the BEAD program admitted that many of the “woke requirements” were “inserted by the prior administration [Biden] for messaging/political purposes” and were “never central to the mission of the program.”
Many of these regulations include attempts to enact “rate regulation” of broadband prices despite the infrastructure bill’s explicit prohibition against such a policy and include climate change mandates that Senate Republicans said “further diverted funds and focus away from the program’s primary objective of ensuring broadband access for unserved and underserved communities.”
“These unnecessary bureaucratic barriers slow deployment, increase costs, and ultimately run contrary to the very purpose of the program and should also be removed,” they added.
Breitbart News has catalogued how the Biden-Harris administration hamstrung the BEAD program:
- Onerous labor requirements that “actively” discriminate against workers in a way that could “deny communities — particularly those in rural areas — access to reliable broadband services.”
- Encouraging government-owned networks over private investment
- Prohibiting non-fiber optic projects from receiving BEAD funding, prioritizing fiber optic cable deployment over wireless internet deployment
- Mandates for affordability and rate regulation. The confusion over how to comply with this rule led to a significant delay in Virginia’s BEAD broadband deployment.
- Eligible projects must account for “climate-related” risks, which was not included in the infrastructure bill text
- The Biden-Harris administration has an inconsistent waiver process to ensure speedy deployment for the purchasing of broadband products and supplies from American workers and businesses.
However, now with Lutnick leading the Commerce Department, Thune and Senate Republicans believe that the BEAD program can finally expand internet access to all Americans despite the heavy obstacles the Biden administration set out for the program.
“Under your leadership, the BEAD program can finally fulfill its long overdue mission and ensure taxpayer dollars are not spent funding extraneous, burdensome regulations,” Thune and the Senate Republicans continued. “Eliminating these obstacles will empower states to work closely with broadband providers and accelerate deployment, maximize resources, and reach truly unserved and underserved communities without any more delay caused by unnecessary government interference.”
Sean Moran is a policy reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on X @SeanMoran3.
