President Biden is focused on his legacy. His administration has made massive investments in infrastructure, a pillar of the 2020 election campaign, but much of the work remains. As Biden shifts attention away from pursuing reelection and toward his presidential duties through January, fulfilling his promise to connect America with high-speed internet and broadband could still be what Biden is remembered. But there’s a problem.
Many close to Biden have acknowledged that the administration’s bureaucratic “procedure fetish” is strangling his broadband agenda with red tape. Billions of taxpayer dollars are stuck in limbo, as with every significant Biden spending program ranging from chip plants to EV chargers all falling behind schedule with little to show for the massive public investment.
The 2022 infrastructure bill devoted a massive $42.5 billion to rural broadband expansion, and for good reason. About 25 million Americans don’t have options for wired broadband service, leaving them cut off from untold remote job opportunities, schooling options and telehealth care. The federal government has failed to pair these investments with streamlining reforms to bulldoze the barriers blocking the bipartisan dream of “internet for all.”
Policymakers are running out of time to remove the procedural obstacles and legislative loopholes preventing meaningful progress. They should start with an obstacle that is boringly ubiquitous yet critically important: utility poles.
Poles are a vital piece of the rural broadband puzzle. The companies that will receive federal money to build networks through rural America must connect their fiber lines to thousands upon thousands of poles owned by other companies. Federal law requires most utilities to let broadband providers rent space on their poles, but these rules have glaring loopholes.
Enforcement has historically moved too slowly to be effective, and the Federal Communications Commission’s efforts to speed up this process remain untested. The result is a mess of access challenges that has slowed rural broadband projects for years and created a headache for network builders that will soon be a five-alarm fire for taxpayers who put up billions for the project.
Here’s what will happen if D.C. doesn’t act: As states award this federal infrastructure funding, broadband providers will ask pole owners for permission to attach fiber along each project route. Some routine requests may be quickly approved, but many may sit unanswered for months.
Others may spark prolonged fights over who should pay to replace old, damaged poles. In some cases, monopoly pole owners — who may have plans to offer broadband service — may refuse to let competing providers rent space.
Billions of dollars of taxpayer-funded broadband projects will halt and devolve into legal disputes that last for months or years. Rural communities will continue to languish without broadband access.
Wise, common-sense reforms would help avoid this debacle. Congress should start by closing the loopholes that exempt rural electric co-ops and municipal utilities from having to share space on their poles. The bipartisan goal of wiring rural America must take precedence over legislative favoritism and special interest carve-outs.
The FCC can help by moving more quickly to resolve pole attachment complaints. Years of slow and ineffective enforcement have let bad actors off the hook while tacitly encouraging pole owners to drag their feet. The FCC recently rolled out a faster process for resolving complaints, but it’s unclear how aggressively the agency will leverage this new tool. If Biden’s FCC appointees want their boss’s signature broadband program to be remembered as anything more than a disaster, they’ll need to enforce the law — quickly, fairly and consistently.
The alternative is to stand by and act surprised as $42.5 billion in broadband funding goes up in smoke, betraying the promises Washington has made to rural communities desperately awaiting broadband access. Those rural consumers know that’s the worst of all worlds.
Biden and Congress need to start taking these risks seriously — and soon — before his big spending on broadband becomes a case study of government failure, and millions of Americans miss out on a connected future.
President Biden has time to make a real difference before the next president is inaugurated and bring Americans closer together with broadband access.
