I’ve been thinking about something that Jake Sullivan, President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, said in a post-election interview: “The president has been operating on a time horizon measured in decades, while the political cycle is measured in four years.” What we’re seeing now is that this was a false choice. There is no way to cleave the policy of the next decade from the outcome of the next election. If you lose power, your carefully constructed set of bills and international alliances can be turned to cinder by your successor. If it is true that President Biden believed he was choosing the politics of posterity over the policies Americans would feel before the election, then he chose wrong. But I don’t think it was a choice. Delay has become the default setting of American government. The 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act was supposed to pump hundreds of billions into roads, bridges, rural broadband, electric vehicle chargers. By 2024, few of its projects were finished or installed. That wasn’t because the Biden team wanted to run for re-election on the backs of news releases rather than ribbon cuttings. But the administration didn’t make the changes necessary to deliver on a time frame the public could feel. Many members of Biden’s staff now bitterly regret it. 

[Ezra Klein joined Opinion in 2021. Previously, he was the founder, editor in chief and then editor at large of Vox; the host of the podcast “The Ezra Klein Show”; and the author of “Why We’re Polarized.”]

Tariff confusion is through the roof right now, but fiber broadband operators and their equipment suppliers probably don’t have much to worry about, according to Dell’Oro Group VP Jeff Heynen. The most common fiber components, such as PON optical line terminals, optical networking terminals, cabinets, and fiber optic cables, "have already been self-certified by the respective vendors and have already seen substantial increases in domestic manufacturing,” Heynen noted. Many fiber vendors, like Nokia, STL, Vecima Networks and others, onshored most of their manufacturing to the U.S. to adhere to the Build America, Buy America requirement of the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment program. BEAD may be going through uncertainties of its own, but that doesn’t change the fact these vendors have already set up shop stateside—a move that is massively beneficial in the current environment.

The city of Baltimore (MD) is building trust and connectivity for its residents through community-centered efforts. Baltimore has made steady progress in recent years toward addressing access, including investing in digital skills training and staffing up to address the gaps. According to Kenya Asli, the city director of broadband and digital equity, this work has advanced further in the past year. It includes building out the city’s middle-mile network, which, Asli explained, lays the foundation for the city’s next project: Officials plan to release a request for proposals to invite a new internet service provider into the city market. “Folks want more options, and so we are bringing in more options,” Asli said, noting the city is lowering the barrier to entry for ISPs through this middle-mile network. Baltimore has also used $5 million to establish a grant program—the second round of funding for which invested $1.8 million in October 2024—to forge partnerships with local nonprofits and leverage existing expertise to better support the community.

FOCUS Broadband announced that nearly 4,000 addresses in Chowan and Perquimans (NC) counties now have access to fiber optic high-speed internet with speeds of up to 5 Gbps, thanks to two North Carolina Department of Information Technology Growing Rural Economies with Access to Technology Grants totaling $8 million. These grants, awarded to FOCUS Broadband in late 2022, have already connected over 1,200 homes and businesses. Work is currently underway with substantial progress having already been made on two additional projects in Chowan and Perquimans counties. These projects were also funded through NCDIT’s GREAT Grant program. The grants, totaling $7.2 million, were awarded in 2023 and will expand broadband service to an additional 1,700 addresses in both counties. Completion is expected in 2025. In total, FOCUS Broadband will contribute approximately $1.7 million in matching funds to these GREAT Grant projects, with additional support provided by each county.

The digital age takes embodied things and offers virtual substitutes, moving entire realms of human interaction and engagement from the physical marketplace to the computer screen. Some of these substitutes have meaningful upsides. But in many cases, the virtual substitutes are clearly inferior to what they’re replacing. But this substitution nonetheless succeeds and deepens because of the power of distraction. Even when the new forms are inferior to the older ones, they are more addictive, more immediate, easier to access — and they feel lower-risk, as well. So even though people ultimately get less out of the virtual substitutes, they still tend to come back to them and eventually depend on them. Thus under digital conditions social life attenuates, romance declines, institutions lose support, the fine arts fade and the popular arts are overrun with slop, and the basic skills and habits that our civilization took for granted — how to have an extended conversation, how to approach a woman or man with romantic interest, how to sit undistracted with a movie or a book — are transmitted only weakly to the next generation. Then, finally, as local embodied experience becomes less important than virtual alternatives, the power of substitution and distraction feeds a sense that real-world life is fundamentally obsolete. Unless the true A.I. doomsayers are correct, in the year 2100 there will still be nations, families, religions, children, marriages, great books. But how much survives will depend on our own deliberate choices — the choice to date and love and marry and procreate, the choice to fight for particular nations and traditions and art forms and worldviews, the choice to limit our exposure to the virtual, not necessarily refusing new technology but trying every day, in every setting, to make ourselves its master. Have the child. Practice the religion. Found the school. Support the local theater, the museum, the opera or concert hall, even if you can see it all on YouTube. Pick up the paintbrush, the ball, the instrument. Learn the language — even if there’s an app for it. Learn to drive, even if you think soon Waymo or Tesla will drive for you. Put up headstones, don’t just burn your dead. Sit with the child, open the book, and read.

A concerning development from the Trump administration has privacy advocates sounding alarm bells nationwide: a plan to consolidate data from dozens of government agencies into what would amount to a comprehensive “master file” on all American citizens. While proponents claim this massive data integration effort will help eliminate waste and fraud, the potential consequences for privacy rights, civil liberties, and national security are profound and deeply troubling. When lawmakers enacted the Privacy Act of 1974, they intentionally designed it to compartmentalize citizens’ data across agencies. This wasn’t an oversight or a technological limitation—it was a deliberate measure shaped by hard-learned lessons about government overreach. The Act established a core principle: personal information collected for one purpose shouldn’t be repurposed without consent or proper legal authority. Now is the time for citizens to understand the importance of their personal information remaining protected, compartmentalized, and used only for its intended purposes. Without this, we risk living in a surveillance state of our own making.

It looks like there are lots and lots (and lots) of federal regulations that US telecommunications industry players want to end. Some of the rules are relatively major, like a requirement that companies disclose network outages or security breaches. Others are very minor, such as a requirement to use the Federal Communications Commission's aging and complex spectrum-management database. Some rules touch on hot-button issues in the current political climate—for example, rules about tracking workforce diversity and others focusing on TV broadcaster ownership. Some of the federal rules are specifically targeted at one company, like the "C-Block Rule" that Verizon wants to eliminate. Others stretch across practically the entire sector, such as those governing the FCC's broadband maps. Taken together, it looks as if the US telecommunications industry is hoping to change or eliminate many rules under FCC Chairman Brendan Carr's new "Delete, Delete, Delete" proceeding.

When Elon Musk and President Donald Trump commanded all federal workers to submit weekly emails listing five accomplishments, they warned of harsh consequences: Failure to comply would count as a resignation. Musk called the emails an accountability measure needed to ensure staff even had a “pulse.” But officials refused to comply with core aspects of the directive from the beginning. In a briefing for top human resources officers across government held just two days after Musk’s directive went out to all federal employees on Feb. 22, the Office of Personnel Management said the initiative was voluntary and noncompliance would not be considered a resignation. Further undermining Musk’s effort, OPM leaders said in the briefing that the agency did not intend to do anything with the messages that employees did submit. As Musk prepares to exit government later in 2025 and his influence appears to wane, the conflicting messages and confusion have had a predictable result: agencies maintain an inconsistent patchwork of policies on the email responses.

Speeds and pricing are still core attributes of today's home broadband services, but service providers are continuing to expand into other aspects of broadband focused on better Wi-Fi and an overall improved customer experience. AT&T's fiber platform already has speed on its side, but the operator is putting more focus on in-home Wi-Fi with the launch of a new package called "All-Fi Pro." The new package features a Wi-Fi 7 gateway, Wi-Fi extenders, and an advanced form of ActiveArmor, an Internet security service that includes a home-side VPN. All-Fi Pro also provides AT&T fiber subs with the ability to upgrade their broadband devices every three years.