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President Joe Biden gently mocked Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) for touting $1.4 billion in federal funding his home state is set to receive for expanded broadband internet access despite voting against it in 2021. “See you at the groundbreaking,” President Biden wrote along with a retweet of Sen.

Colleges are seeing a surge in technology majors, but rural students are lagging behind on opportunities to take advantage of the growing, high-paying fields. From 2018 to 2022, Computer and Information Sciences and Support Services majors increased 23 percent, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, from 423,315 to 518,844. Rural students, however, face two pressing issues: the digital divide of internet reliability and technology access and education opportunities. The National Center for Education Statistics said that in 2019, around 76 percent of rural students

Typical of the bureaucratic nature of the federal government, rural broadband investments remain with traditional infrastructure, such as fiber-optic, cable modem, and DSL. While these technologies are important and economically viable in dense urban areas, we must recognize that new technologies are now available that will bring down costs and actually achieve the goal of total connectivity across the US.

The ongoing Farm Bill negotiations may mean linking millions of Americans to the 21st-century economy and taking a step toward the broader dream of high-tech agriculture. Since the last Farm Bill was passed in 2018, the federal government has spent billions to try to bring high-speed internet to the nearly 12 million rural households that don’t have it.

A bipartisan effort to push the Federal Communications Commission to expand internet access to rural areas will finally get a Senate hearing, two years after the bill was first introduced. The Reforming Broadband Connectivity Act has support in both the House and Senate and will get its day in the Senate Commerce Committee Thursday, May 11th, 2023. The bill — introduced by Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) in the Senate and Rep. Joe Neguse (D-CO) in the House — orders the FCC to determine ho