Where is Congress?

One of the things that mystifies me is how many federal elected officials have disappeared in terms of supporting broadband. For example, there has been little talk of elected officials openly trying to stop the National Telecommunications and Information Administration from gutting the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment (BEAD) Program. There’s no news about trying to force NTIA to go ahead and award grants from the Digital Equity Act. This may be happening behind the scenes, but there’s no big public news about supporting better broadband. The sudden indifference to broadband is a huge shift from just the recent past. Broadband has always been one of the few topics that has had bipartisan support from rural legislators, because they all knew that this was important to their constituents. Over the last five or ten years, I’ve heard from dozens of County governments who have said that the lack of good broadband was the number one issue for their constituents.