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Ezra Klein and Jon Stewart over-simplify and caricature the restrictions on this $42.5 billion broadband grant program to falsely paint the whole thing as an irredeemable waste. But they fail to mention a lot of important stuff because they didn't actually understand what they were talking about...

it also...took extra time because states and feds basically had to completely remap broadband access because our broadband maps, for decades, have been shit. You don't want to throw $42.5 billion in taxpayer dollars at a problem you haven't measured accurately. That would be...bad.

Klein is also so busy trying to paint BEAD as a useless boondoggle), he fails to mention a bill from that same year (ARPA) was a huge success, driving $25 billion in fiber everywhere you probably didn't know this because dem messaging sucks and the press doesn't care about infrastructure

Anyway, Klein and Stewart's portrayal of BEAD as a COMPLETELY worthless boondoggle was quickly picked up by right wing media, which has been trying to make this same case for years in part because they want to redirect the money to elon musk. So nice job there, I guess.

isn't this incompatible with the explanation that nothing could be done until there had been more mapping? this fiber rollout clearly could be done without an extensive survey first, no? it did get done and they didn't wait for such a survey.

Worst part is I'm sure someone would retort this by saying "well, force the ISPs to share their internal data" but having seen some of the internal datasets, they were probably just as outdated.

Klein is an idiot who despite having a wonkish reputation clearly has never had to deal with policy implementation beyond the high level goals. Easy to describe the details as red tape if you've never bothered to get into details.

For clarity, was his timeline incorrect, or is the issue that he didn't research enough about why the timeline was built that way?

he didn't research deeply enough to understand why this program has these restrictions, or that other broadband subsidy programs from the same year were successful, or that the program is currently being hijacked by the GOP to pad Elon Musk's wallet (which he just..doesn't mention?)

As a Philly guy, I was proud to see the destroyed part of I95 rebuilt in 12 days. Great ideas must be measured by outcomes. The $42B broadband funding was a GREAT idea... that's nowhere near completion. It wasn't a "useless boondoggle", but it is despiriting. Dems need more GSDers! #getshitdone