Republican Debt Ceiling Plan Would Screw Up Multiple Bipartisan Broadband Initiatives They Previously Claimed To Support

Policy

from the watch-what-i-do,-not-what-i-say dept

The GOP is currently trying to hold the global economy hostage by using the debt ceiling debate as a bludgeon. Mostly to implement budget cuts nobody likes (like major budget cuts at the VA, or cuts to vast swaths of the country’s already faltering social safety net). If it goes badly, economists warn the net result could be global economic chaos and a completely avoidable recession. No biggie.

More quietly, telecom insiders note that the GOP’s plans would also cut funding for a number of telecom initiatives the GOP previously claimed to support, such as boosting rural broadband access, or the already incompetently under-funded effort to rip out Chinese telecom gear from U.S. networks and replace it with less shoddy and surveillance prone alternatives.

Both the COVID relief (American Rescue Plan Act) and infrastructure (Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act) bills contained an historic amount of money for broadband expansion. While the GOP largely opposed both bills, they’ve been busy taking credit for the broadband expansion the bills made possible while hoping nobody’s smart enough to notice (fairly successfully, as it turns out).

Both bills did a number of other things as well, including funding fixes for the FCC’s terrible broadband maps, which are used to dictate which areas get priority in broadband funding. As well as shoring up broadband access for school children, something Republicans also claim to support when it comes time for fund raising campaigns and television ads.

But the GOP’s budget proposal attempts to unrealistically claw back a huge swath of this money, much of which has already been spent or is in the process of being spent:

A Democratic aide for the House Energy and Commerce Committee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the record, said the bill “risks unraveling several, popular bipartisan programs.”

“This bill revokes funding for students’ internet connectivity, accurate broadband mapping, and ensuring our communications equipment is protected from espionage and disruption by hostile foreign governments like China,” the aide said.

The GOP’s response to these criticisms has been to simply lie and claim that accurate descriptions of their budget proposals are all lies. Granted the GOP’s attempts to “negotiate” for the better part of the last several decades have been to propose outlandish, unpopular and extreme bullshit, then settle somewhere slightly more cogent, with the net result still generally being terrible and unpopular.

Republicans have spent a large chunk of the last year taking credit for broadband proposals they didn’t actually support and would now be dismantled by their own proposal. They’ve also nabbed endless cable news appearances hyperventilating about Chinese infiltration of U.S. telecom networks, and now want to cut already under-funded efforts to do anything about it.

Democrats have no shortage of problems; corruption, competency, or otherwise. Especially in a telecom policy arena where even acknowledging that monopolies exist is viewed as somehow radical. But what the GOP has become is akin to an incontinent, lying toddler whose contribution to the complicated internet policy challenges of the modern era are generally of the flung fecal variety.

The GOP now inhabits an alternative reality where they support or oppose varying policies by the day depending on how they believe it helps them in cable news appearances and fund raising. All while the feckless mainstream press gives the party unearned credibility for adult internet policymaking that isn’t, and policies the party never meaningfully supported in the first place.

When the GOP is pressed on its slide into radical policy incoherence, the response is the intellectual equivalent of a wet fart. In case it’s not yet abundantly evident, this all ends in disaster without a massive upheaval of the corrupt congressional gerontocracy, some significant introspection by a gullible/complicit press, and an Earth-shaking electoral sea change.

Filed Under: arpa, bead, broadband, chinese network gear, debt ceiling, fcc maps, gop, iija, internet policy, rip and replace, school broadband, telecom