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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...

(BEAD) has many of these restrictions because they were trying to avoid all the fraud, scandals, and problems in an earlier FCC program mismanaged by Trump (RDOF), where ISPs (and elon musk) took tons of taxpayer money for deployments they couldn't finish (Klein doesn't mention this)

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.

none of this is to say democrats don't suck at messaging or strategy or BEAD doesn't have very real problems, but I guess I would like high profile people to actually know what the fuck they're talking about when they stumble out of their lanes

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.

ARPA is leveraging many of the same mapping improvements necessary for BEAD. BEAD is slower because it's a bigger program, with yes, more restrictions, and additional layers of state involvement but BEAD money was flowing this year. Framing it as entirely worthless is foundationally incorrect.

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force the ISPs to share their internal data" but having seen some of the internal datasets, they were probably just as outdated.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.