President Donald J. Trump has been adamant about one thing: the United States is in an existential race against the People’s Republic of China to win the biggest prize of all: AI dominance.

President Trump has also weighed in on the side of data centers to meet the demand provided by accelerated AI adoption. Microsoft recently reported a $680 billion backlog in demand for its cloud services—an 84% increase over the previous year. This is America’s future. 

Conventional wisdom today about AI mirrors conventional wisdom about broadband access a decade ago: It is no longer a luxury or a utility; it's a necessity.

AI can automate work routines, compute and execute complex tasks, save immense amounts of time on research (where was AI when I was in law school ?!?), connect dots through pattern recognition that is revolutionizing healthcare, and generate ideas that provide intellectual bridges that entrepreneurs walk over to innovate every sector of our economy.

AI is literally the backbone of economic progress for the 21st century.

And none of that matters if you are not online.   

How can we strangle AI in its cradle on the cusp of universal adoption? Let me count the ways. 

Take the current proceeding on E-Rate, which is in comment-period mode until October 13, courtesy of the FCC. 

 E-Rate has been the broadband lifeline for thousands of schools and libraries across the United States for decades, many of which lack the resources to provide internet access to their tens of millions of students and patrons. While concerns about ‘screen time’ for students are somewhat justified, states like my own Missouri have banned cell phone access for students, which is a blessing for school libraries, whose staff are trained in best practices for gathering information, including AI usage. Who better to guide the next generation’s introduction to AI than school librarians? 

The Digital Equity Act suffered from guilt by association—the E-word, same as BEAD. Looking past the E-word (“Access” describes it sufficiently), the stated goals were to expand broadband availability and adoption and improve digital literacy and skills. 

Which comes in real handy when dealing with AI. 

The Affordable Connectivity Program died in 2024. That program gave millions a path to broadband internet resources their flip phones couldn't provide—including AI.

That meant no AI for millions of Americans who lost internet coverage as a result. 

So far, no good.

That brings us to BEAD, which Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and his minions at the NTIA have systematically hamstrung. 

As written into statute, this program was designed to bridge the digital divide once and for all with a $42 billion investment into every corner of the United States. When the Trump Administration began in January 2025, every state in the Union had obtained initial approvals. Instead of following the statute, the Trump NTIA mandated that the states start over, regardless of how far they had progressed on mapping and the application process. Or how good the speeds were going to be for the affected areas (fiber brings the best). 

NTIA next decided that more than $20 billion of the initial allocation could be “saved” by preferring lower-cost, lower-speed alternatives—at the precise moment when providers knew that accelerating AI adoption was driving “the need for speed,” as AI computations soaked up increasing amounts of bandwidth. 

But NTIA had better things to do than future-proof AI access and adoption. 

Nothing. 

Literally. 

While AI adoption took off, NTIA took nearly a year to decide what to do with these “saved” “non-deployment” funds. At long last, NTIA announced that it would sort of follow the statute and allocate more funding to physical access, sort of. No mention of increasing speed, despite the fact that President Trump has a stated goal of winning the AI race, which only happens through universal adoption (how else are Large Language Models supposed to learn and innovations supposed to emerge?).

After watching this farce for the last two years, I have come to a sad conclusion:

President Trump’s people in the Broadband space are not serving him well.

If they were, they would stop playing small-ball and swing for the fences. If President Trump’s appointees really wanted to win the AI race, they would move heaven and earth to get the best speeds money can buy to the most people, future-proofing AI physical access and enabling universal adoption much faster.

They would also stop dithering on non-deployment funds and announce that they can be used to promote universal AI adoption through employing digital navigators (who exist in large numbers in educational settings like schools and public libraries). 

With apologies to Elon Musk, this really is not rocket science. 

It is also not penny-wise, pound-foolish. 

Which these days is the sole province of the Federal government.

Louis Riggs is a State Representative in the Missouri House of Representatives from Hannibal, Missouri.

The Benton Institute for Broadband & Society is a non-profit organization dedicated to ensuring that all people in the U.S. have access to competitive, High-Performance Broadband regardless of where they live or who they are. We believe communication policy - rooted in the values of access, equity, and diversity - has the power to deliver new opportunities and strengthen communities.

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