Pennywise, Pound Foolish: Inside the BEAD Program’s Latest Shakeup - Episode 651 of the Community Broadband Bits Podcast

Christopher Mitchell (00:11):
Welcome to another episode of the Community Broadband Bits podcast, Monday Morning Edition. This is Chris Mitchell at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. I'm in St. Paul, Minnesota. It's Monday, first thing, and I dragged Evan out. Evan Feinman, former guest back [00:00:30] to join us to talk about BEAD. Welcome to the show, Evan.

Evan Feinman (00:34):
Chris, really happy to be here. Would prefer to be here under slightly different circumstances, but always happy to talk.

Christopher Mitchell (00:42):
I appreciate you coming back for another rapid release show. You're the former BEAD director at NTIA. You oversaw the program and you've been outspoken in your concern about changes to it that would be unnecessary. You've made the point along with others that [00:01:00] the Trump administration could have a huge win if they would just move ahead and take credit while only making the changes that they seem to be most animated around striking some provisions around DEI and climate and things like that. So we're going to ask

Evan Feinman (01:16):
You, I've taken the position that congressional Republicans have taken that most Republican and democratic governors have taken, which is absolutely, go ahead, strip out the quote woke parts of the program, but otherwise [00:01:30] respect the investment of capital from private industry, respect the fact that states, red states, blue states, purple states, have spent years working with industry and working with communities to build plans that are actually going to solve this problem and go get the win. It just is crazy to me that we're going to spend a bunch of extra money and burn a bunch of resources that were already expended [00:02:00] just so we can get people worse connections that cost more. It's just crazy

Christopher Mitchell (02:04):
And not just people. I would guess that of the locations that are eligible, more than 75% voted for Trump. That would be my guess of these areas. These are Trump's supporters largely.

Evan Feinman (02:14):
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it's a massive betrayal of his strongest supporters by the President's administration, and to be honest, I don't think the president has any clear understanding of what's going on here. I think this is not being driven out of [00:02:30] the Oval Office. I think this is being driven out of a set of misunderstandings or poor understandings from the Secretary of Commerce's office, and they're going to run basically RDOF 2.0. It's going to be a failure

Christopher Mitchell (02:47):
And that's worth noting. I think we'll probably come back to that and talk about it here or there, but the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund is something that I've written quite a bit about and featured a reverse auction type approach in which no technology [00:03:00] was really vetted ahead of time, no bidder was vetted ahead of time. They just hope for the best and one out of three of the awards has already been defaulted and we expect more to not be built over time. It was an embarrassment of an approach, but I don't want to dig too much into that. I just want to get a sense of what is your quick reaction to all of the changes that came out on Friday?

Evan Feinman (03:23):
Yeah, my reaction is that it's somewhat worse than we'd expected. We were really concerned that they were going [00:03:30] to set a low national, extremely high cost per location threshold, which is the idea that was being kicked around when I departed what they did and the nightmare scenario there was like, oh, they could set it as low as $1,200. What they've done instead is they've effectively set it at a penny, even though the legislation is really clear that there needs to be a priority project and [00:04:00] those priority projects effectively have to be fiber. What they've done is they kicked it to the states and it is a very clever bit of regulatory work on their part. So my hat, and that makes sense, right? The staff at NTIA are good civil servants who however they may personally feel about something, will do a good job accomplishing the [00:04:30] goals set before them by this administration. And so what they did was they said, well, now states define the priority projects, but they have to be technology neutral. And so they really put states in an impossible position during this 90 day period if they try to do anything other than effectively award projects to whoever the lowest cost bidder is.

Christopher Mitchell (04:51):
Right. Doug Dawson in POTs and PANs by CCG this morning summed it up saying Any technology that can deliver 100 megabit by 20 megabit [00:05:00] broadband today is now eligible to win a BEAD grant. While there's a caveat, the winning technology must have the capability over time to scale to support rural 5G and other wireless needs, there's no specific equipment commitment required by a grant winner to make future upgrades. So this is, I thought it was a fairly remarkable change in that, like you said, we kind of expected that they would shift the balance to support more LEO and fixed wireless, [00:05:30] and it sure looks now like the balance tech neutral, if you're not going to consider operational differences, means that the cheapest technology has the edge. So this isn't neutral in any way. It is a fixed wireless approach and wherever there is not a fixed wireless bid, according to Doug Dawson, which I think is a good analysis, that's the only place that fiber could win. Fiber could not win where it's going head to head with fixed wireless.

Evan Feinman (05:57):
Well, so there's a mix [00:06:00] in the same way that the secretary's office does a really bad job not recognizing the difference between broadband types. I think we would be making a mistake by lumping all fixed wireless into the same pot. There are really high quality excellent fixed wireless [00:06:30] providers who are using modern, scalable technology that are providing great service. And so to the extent that fiber is displaced by that kind of company and that kind of fixed wireless provider, it's not a terrible outcome. It's not as good, but it's not a terrible outcome. What worries me though is there are a lot of fixed wireless providers who have been bad actors in the broadband space [00:07:00] and the people who should like those companies the least are the good fixed wireless providers.

Christopher Mitchell (07:04):
A hundred percent I agree.

Evan Feinman (07:05):
By the same brush and especially in the unlicensed space where again, there exist great actors there just but there a ton of kind of wildcatters who are not going to invest in their networks and who are going to play the old protectionist game of claiming that they already serve places they don't serve well, those winners are going to be bad. There's going to be a dramatic escalation [00:07:30] in the amount of Low Earth Orbit. I mean, at this point, the only limit to the number of locations that the Low Earth Orbit networks will win is how far they want to push their own credibility. If one of them comes forward and says, I want to bid on every location in a state and I want to do it at $4,000 a location, it will be very, very, very challenging for a state [00:08:00] broadband office to bring forward awards for other technologies.

(08:08):
They will have to prove out that that entity won't have the capacity four years from now to serve those folks against a very skeptical department of commerce. And even worse, this incredibly unrealistic 90 day timeframe, which will only encourage [00:08:30] slipshod work, will only encourage a declaration of victory upon having pushed a bunch of money out the door as opposed to having actually invested wisely in infrastructure that will serve the country also raises the stakes for those states, right? If you're a state broadband office and you spend the time to construct a good plan, but one that potentially bucks that lower orbit satellite provider, you run the risk that the 90 days will run out that NTIA will [00:09:00] reject your proposal and then who knows what they're going to do. I mean, they might not let you submit another one,

Christopher Mitchell (09:06):
Right? And you could see actually certain states that would be more in favor with the Secretary of Commerce may be able to resubmit and other states may not. We may see arbitrary and capricious decisions about that.

Evan Feinman (09:18):
We may, I mean, we don't know that. I don't think we can say that that'll certainly happen, but there certainly is that risk. I mean, there's definitely a trust deficit, and I think [00:09:30] the biggest travesty in all of this is the failure to advance the plans that were already done. I mean, they talk about efficiency. It is madness not to move forward with the proposals that are already in existence. And there you've seen the Secretary of Commerce, I suspect, or if you have not, some of the listeners have taking to Twitter to say, oh my God, there exists this one [00:10:00] project, this one 22 million project in Nevada where they're spending $77,000 on a couple hundred locations. And it's like, guys, first of all, that is an edge, edge, edge case, but second of all, if you wanted to eliminate that, then eliminate that. I don't think that's the right choice.

(10:27):
I think it's actually reasonable to invest one time [00:10:30] capital in getting good infrastructure to people, and I think we should trust states to know what's best for their own citizens. But even if you wanted to say, okay, we're not going to spend $70,000 to get a location connected, then set an extremely high cost per location threshold at 50 grand and say everything above this has to be leased cost, but instead they're using that edge case as cover to radically reshape the whole [00:11:00] map. And what you're going to see is them cutting a bunch of checks in an unaccountable way to whatever company comes forward with the cheapest upfront cost, and they're going to stick rural communities with slower Internet and higher monthly bills.

Christopher Mitchell (11:23):
The way you said about how they've adjusted the priority projects, I have thought they would leave themselves [00:11:30] open to potential lawsuit there, and I'm curious whether you think we'll see states finding grounds under that or other grounds to say that they are not following the statute.

Evan Feinman (11:43):
Yeah. I worked with a really, really, really brilliant attorney named Elizabeth Myers at Virginia Attorney General's office when I was [00:12:00] the Chief Broadband Advisor to Governor Northam, and she would've been pretty annoyed with me over the last couple of days if I were still in that role because I would absolutely have been exploring and I would've had her working over the weekend exploring what my legal options were. Sovereign immunity is good. It's good to be the king, and so filing suit against the federal government is hard, and as I said, [00:12:30] this timeframe that they've laid out raises the stakes for that kind of work. I do think there will be a lot of conversations with people both from sub-grantees who potentially will lose awards and I think especially sub-grantees that were awarded by properly legally approved final proposals in Nevada and Louisiana and Delaware should be thinking about it. [00:13:00] I am neither a talented enough attorney, nor have I done the work to figure out exactly what claims have merit and what ones don't in this instance, but it is certainly something that will be explored and is being explored by those actors.

Christopher Mitchell (13:18):
But you're saying that one of the things that makes it more difficult, I would imagine, is that if a state were to file a lawsuit, they probably also still have to try to meet these requirements or else [00:13:30] they risk losing everything.

Evan Feinman (13:33):
Yeah, I know. I think you definitely have to, no matter what else you have to do, you have to minimize the risk that you'll have hundreds of millions or billions of dollars clawed back by the federal government, right? There's no circumstance where someone who works for a governor wants to walk into their boss's office and say, Hey, we went on a limb and we blew it, and now we're not going to get to move forward with those funds. At the same [00:14:00] time, I think you're really failing in your obligation as a civil servant if you don't try to do the best for the people that you're there to serve. And we're going to see some talented folks try to negotiate with NTIA about this stuff. I also think there's going to be a bunch of extensions. Granted, [00:14:30] I think Greg and Aaron and the rest of the team at the Texas Broadband Office are really smart, talented folks. That comptroller's office has a lot of resources that they can put toward their mission, and they've got 3.3 billion dollars in their allocation in Texas. There's no way they're going to be able to line up hundreds [00:15:00] and hundreds of thousands of locations worth of projects in the next 90 days, even if they already were done, even if they're ready this moment to take,

Christopher Mitchell (15:10):
Right? I mean, so they've been thrown a wild card in that now the unlicensed fixed wireless locations are, some of them are available, others are not available, or they get changes that math. They have to have a new proposal in within 30 days. [00:15:30] Just remind us some of the timelines here. So within 30 days they have to have a new proposal, and to do that, I think they need to be locking down what locations are available as well.

Evan Feinman (15:39):
So yes, they basically have to do a one week challenge process with the unlicensed fixed wireless providers, which is going to be bad. There's no good way to do that. And so what'll wind up happening is most states will just wind up [00:16:00] doing exactly what the challenge process was supposed to avoid, which is just trusting what the ISPs say about where they're serving and where they're not serving per the FCC map. The biggest issue with that is that availability and capacity are not the same thing, and we talked about this before, but someone can accurately report to the FCC map. I can serve 10,000 houses that I can see from this tower. They're [00:16:30] not violating the law or the fccs rules when they say that, even if they've only got enough backhaul capacity from that tower to serve one of those houses because they haven't sold it yet, and so it is available to those 10,000 houses.

(16:41):
And so on the map, it shows it available to those 10,000 houses, but it's not really, and sorting that out is something that took a long time in the challenge process in the context of the licensed fixed wireless community. We also need to talk about why we didn't call that reliable in the first place, which is that any other person in the country can show [00:17:00] up and start using that portion of the broadcast spectrum to do anything else, not just compete with them for residential customers, but can do anything else you do with broadcast spectrum, including new developing technologies that we don't know about yet, and start interfering with that signal. There is no guarantee that availability of unlicensed fixed wireless today means that it'll be available tomorrow.

Christopher Mitchell (17:23):
Right? And we're not going to dive back into it. I want to make sure that people had a sense of that within [00:17:30] 30 days they need to go through this, they need to set that up. What are the other key dates here that the secretary outlined in the,

Evan Feinman (17:37):
They've got 30 days to get their initial proposal back in, and then they've got 90 days effectively to get their final proposal done, which would be an extremely abbreviated timeframe, had already announced that they were taking in applications on a given date. It takes a long time to do those, and then there's a negotiation phase to this work, which people don't seem to understand in the secretary's office. [00:18:00] To be fair, it took us a long time to talk the former assistant secretary and secretary through that. You don't just bid stuff out and then make awards. As I've said before, it is easy to just take in a bunch of prep proposals and fund the highest scores until you run out of money and then say that the job was done. The problem is that fails at getting everybody online. We know that fails at getting everybody online because people have run that experiment several [00:18:30] dozen times at the state level and a dozen times at the federal level, and it failed every time.

(18:36):
And so by eliminating the opportunity to do that negotiation and forcing all of this one size fits all approach and removing state discretion, what you're going to be left with is one, a map that doesn't cover everybody. Two higher monthly bills for rural residents, three slower Internet speeds for rural residents. That means [00:19:00] that the federal government or the state governments are going to have to come in and solve this problem again in the future. Instead of solving it today, it's kicking the can down the road. And then four, the law currently says if you don't spend your deployment money on all of it on deployment, then you can spend it on the following permissible non-employment activities. And so the only thing that they care about in the secretary's office is driving [00:19:30] the one time upfront cost of this as low as they can. And anybody who's ever built anything knows that just doing the cheapest thing that might pass an eyeball test is not necessarily the best or most efficient use of funds. But there's also implicit in this the idea that, well, we know this group of people doesn't like those non-employment uses that are authorized by statute as well. And so again,

Christopher Mitchell (19:55):
When you say non-employment, you're talking about getting devices into people's hands, doing trainings [00:20:00] and things like that,

Evan Feinman (20:02):
But we know that's authorized by law. Oh,

Christopher Mitchell (20:04):
Sorry. Also workforce development, another key one.

Evan Feinman (20:06):
Yes, there would be no reason to do what they're doing, which is pile a ton more money into the non-employment category based on anything we know about them. And so implicit in this plan is the idea that there will be a claw back of the unspent funds. And so in that instance, what we're really talking about [00:20:30] is one, them trying to change the law without changing the law because the law permits the use of those funds on those things. And two, a potential train wreck where we wind up spending more money on the squishier non deployment than we spend on hard infrastructure, which I don't think is what they want to do either, but they

Christopher Mitchell (20:53):
Don't. I think they're calling it back. I mean, Alexis Schrubbe did a pretty cool spreadsheet on [00:21:00] this, and I haven't read the full documents, but I've been relying more on people like her that have done a good job, and later today I'll be talking with still some other folks who do this sort of thing. She says, and this is a quote from her, it rescinds all previous allocated non deployment BEAD funds, including funding set aside for workforce development, digital equity mapping improvements, local coordination and technical assistance, that money is no longer available and importantly [00:21:30] will not be reimbursed. And that's one of those things that caught me as well, where states have already in good faith, had some expenditures along these lines, is my understanding.

Evan Feinman (21:39):
Yeah. Well, so there's two things there. First is it's just being a bad actor to tell people they can undertake an expense and that you'll pay for it out of a grand and have them not do anything wrong and then not reimburse their expenses. I also suspect that won't [00:22:00] be what happens, people who accrued expenses prior to the release of this policy. Notice the folks at nist, the grant officers are going to pay those expenses. There's just no way. They're good, responsible civil servants. They're going to do the right thing there and they're going to follow the law. But the abandonment of the workforce approaches is foolish because we know we have a workforce shortfall, but also I really think what they're going to try to do is claw back those funds even though the law could not be more explicit, [00:22:30] that the funds can be spent on that if they're not spent on deployment. What would make more sense would be to trust our federal system, trust our state partners. This was not a Biden administration thing. These plans were developed by the states. You don't trust the Biden administration. That's fine. Right.

Christopher Mitchell (22:56):
Let me Illustrate that.

Evan Feinman (22:58):
Government of Alabama, the Government [00:23:00] of Wyoming, the Government of North Dakota, the Government of Montana, I mean these are folks that they were not doing wasteful, foolish stuff. I mean, neither by the way, were any of the blue states. I called out the red states specifically to point out the madness of this approach.

Christopher Mitchell (23:18):
Yeah, let me give you an example because you're familiar with this more than I am, and when I talked with Josh Etheridge at EPC, who's been quite outspoken on this and standing up for Louisiana, the way he describes it, [00:23:30] Louisiana's approach to labor and other issues, but probably quite important to the Biden administration, I would say, did not seem to me to live up to what a Biden micromanager would have wanted. And NTIA said, you're Louisiana, your program, and basically allowed them to do it their way. To me, that is the evidence for what you just said, which is not just that Evan said it, but that we can look at the Louisiana [00:24:00] plan and see that it was a Louisiana plan and not a Joe Biden plan.

Evan Feinman (24:03):
Oh, yeah. Well, I mean that's the thing is the whole woke thing was always made up and it was made up on both sides. I do want to be honest about that. The Biden administration was pretending that it included a bunch of environmental and labor protections that it didn't include, and that was useful to them. And then it was useful to the Republicans to pretend that it contained those as well. [00:24:30] The reality was people had to generate a little bit of prose. You could have met all of the burdensome woke requirements on the states of the program with 45 seconds and Chat GPT. It was purely a requirement that you make some rhetorical nods in these directions. There really was no other significant thing. Now, some states did do some stuff on the labor and wage, and that often [00:25:00] got confused, especially in congressional hearings where people say, oh, New York has this very aggressive low cost service requirement. And it's like, yeah, that's a New York state law and regulatory thing that's

Christopher Mitchell (25:13):
Not passed before the Biden administration was elected.

Evan Feinman (25:17):
It's not. We're not, right. So they can do that, and what we said to New York when they did that was you need to carve out an exception for this. Our strong advice is for you not to apply this to your BEAD, or if you try to do it within BEAD [00:25:30] and you fail, that's fine. That'll be evidence, and then we'll work with you to fix it. We saw that happen. I mean, there was a state that overreached on how far it was pushing industry, and they had a bad first round. And so we went and we worked with 'em. We said, look, you should listen to what ISPs are telling you about why they didn't apply and why costs were so high and that state went back and did it and had a really successful second round, right. Loosened some of those restrictions, and that's laboratories of democracy working, and this is them just [00:26:00] pad locking the door of those laboratories of democracy telling states the federal government knows better than they do what their communities need and really delivering a BS bargain as opposed to the benefit of the bargain and to rural America.

Christopher Mitchell (26:17):
How should states be responding now? I mean, you've already talked about briefly that it seems like some of the rumors that I heard last week before everything came out suggested [00:26:30] amounts of overreach. That would've been a trivial court case to win. This is a document that is not obviously easily stopped by the courts. I think, like you said, there could be cases. I was kind of hoping that it would be one in which they left themselves very vulnerable, but so absent. Aside from that, you've also mentioned that those who are in the states where they had awards that were committed to them, they may have a case. What else should states be doing as they think about this?

Evan Feinman (26:59):
Well, [00:27:00] I mean, states need to be moving forward as quickly as they can. States have been given the power to determine if something is or isn't a priority broadband project, and I think states should very closely interrogate that. One of the things that worries me is that you're now going to see a set of states push LEO out as a viable option because it's [00:27:30] pretty unlikely that you can make the argument that Low Earth Orbit networks are able to meet the priority broadband description, but that's going to be uneven across the country, and Starlink is a good technology for remote locations, and while I don't want to see Starlink serving millions of [00:28:00] locations across the country because it won't be fast enough and it won't have enough network capacity, it is a really good option for that really remote location for that handful of folks up to 10, 11% in the less dense states.

(28:18):
But it doesn't in general actually meet the standard for broadband, right? It's not averaging 20 megabits per second upload speeds. It's just not, and we didn't too closely interrogate that because it was [00:28:30] the best option for those remote locations. If we have to drag that argument out into the public, I think that'll create more negatives than positives. It'll also wind up creating a sort of patchwork approach across the country in terms of that question. I also think there's, but I think states should really look at what's it mean for us to do that. I also think deconfliction is going to be really important now, especially in the states that take the building block approach as opposed to the apply for a whole project area approach.

(29:00):
[00:29:00] I also think credit where credit's due, the inclusion of the ability of states to this is something that I was preaching the whole time. They got this one right in the policy notice that revises the NOFO saying ISPs can carve out the most expensive locations is a good approach. I mean, it's something that happened in negotiation phase anyway, but explicitly putting it in there is good. That'll be positive when they do that [00:29:30] because that'll help pick those locations up for LEO. But in terms of what states should be doing, states should be exploring every option to push back and preserve good connectivity for their folks. States should also be screaming to their congressional delegations to push back on this, I'm also incredibly disappointed, especially in the industry generally, but the trade associations that represent primarily wireline providers who have just said, oh, we really welcome this change. [00:30:00] It's such a failure. They're not serving their members' interest very well, and fiber providers have just lost billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands or millions of customers as a result of this change. And while that's bad for rural America and it's bad for growing communities and it's bad for the agricultural sector and it's bad for our international competitiveness, it's [00:30:30] also really straightforwardly bad for that sector of the telecom industry and the idea that they're sufficiently craven that they won't even say what's true for their own members and their own members. Pocketbooks, I think is also pretty bad.

Christopher Mitchell (30:44):
I've continued to be mystified about the Low Earth Orbit inclusion of this. Now, from one hand, I understand if you're in Maine, for instance, I like Maine is a good example. I think because Maine has a number of deeply expensive rural [00:31:00] remote connections where it makes sense for fiberlink to be the option. When we start saying that in the way that you and I feared to say that Low Earth Orbit should be more viable in more places, which are areas that are can meet, could be connected with fiber for a hundred year connection. What I'm trying to get at is that when you take a connection, a location that was going to get fiber and you throw it open [00:31:30] to be competitive with fixed wireless and Low Earth Orbit wireless, I don't understand the difference between the, so if low, I'm sorry. If the award goes to the fixed wireless provider, they're going to be putting a tower and new equipment out there and things like that with that money to serve that home.

(31:50):
Instead, if that money goes to Starlink or Kuiper, they put that money into satellites that go up and that home does [00:32:00] not have a new service. And this was one of the things that has killed me with other programs as well. Connect America Fund II gave money to ViaSat, and what it did was it actually double screwed the homes in locations that were served by that because those people no longer had the hope of a terrestrial service. They were more locked into ViaSat, which made more money, and they had to pay the same amount. So how does a homeowner in a rural area benefit from Starlink getting more money when that homeowner has already decided Starlink doesn't meet their needs or [00:32:30] it's too expensive,

Evan Feinman (32:32):
So there is some benefit gain by getting money to the LEO provider, which is that you are reserving capacity, and so you are saying, no matter what else happens, you satellite provider must ensure that you're going to be able to deliver 100 over 20 to this location for the period of performance.

Christopher Mitchell (32:54):
So during that time, they would not, if that homeowner went to sign [00:33:00] up and they were put on a wait list, that would violate the terms of

Evan Feinman (33:04):
The Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, everywhere that they've been awarded, they've got to be able to get service to 'em in 10 days. They've got to be able to do it with no upfront cost for equipment, and that service has to be able to perform at the minimum standard, and again, four really remote locations. That reservation of capacity is a good thing because it's the only train leaving the station, so we might as well get our folks a ticket, but [00:33:30] in the areas where you could get them a better technology, that's what you should do. And there's just a broad, I think about Montana.

(33:41):
Montana is a really tough place to serve, neither it's not Wyoming, parts of it are, but it's not super, super, super non dense, but there's a lot of lightly settled territory that's not a great candidate for fixed wireless, but it's not a great candidate for [00:34:00] fiber either. They're both really expensive and you're going to do a lot of LEO there anyway, but what you shouldn't do is say in those parts of our communities where we can run a fiber up there and we can get a bunch of folks on a fiber connection in town and then a fixed wireless connection for the folks that we can see from town saying, all of you guys have LEO now just makes no sense. You're really not serving those people well. You're also really, really, [00:34:30] really facilitating at best and unrealistically rosy view of the ability of those LEO networks to serve that many people at the speeds we're talking about when, again, today with millions fewer customers, they're not really able to meet the standard that's laid forth as the minimum bargain basement. You have to be able to do this to be called broadband [00:35:00] connectivity.

Christopher Mitchell (35:02):
Any last thoughts before we wrap up?

Evan Feinman (35:08):
Yeah. This is really bad and it's really bad for all the folks that we were worried it was going to be really bad for, it's really bad for rural West Virginians. It's really bad for rural montanans. It's really bad for anybody who cares about the economic competitiveness of the agriculture sector in this country. It's really bad for anybody who cares about the economic competitiveness and the future [00:35:30] viability of rural communities in America. This is a lazy, cheap selling out of the communities that were trusting this administration to do the right thing by them, and if you're a member of Congress who represents a district that had beat eligible locations, this is a moment that you need to step up and stand up for [00:36:00] your folks. You went to office for a reason you ran, not for the franking privilege you ran, so you could stand up for your folks. Please do it. This is not good. This is, and this is not a wise use of taxpayer dollars. This is Pennywise and pound foolish. If it's even Pennywise, they're bad changes. They make no sense, and I really, really, really hope that their folks will [00:36:30] stand up and say what's true as opposed to knuckle under and sell out rural America.

Christopher Mitchell (36:39):
Yeah. That's one of the things that's going to blow my mind is in three and four years when the ones that haven't retired and just left with their tail between their legs who say, oh, well, we never could have known that this was going to happen, or some version of that, trying to pretend [00:37:00] they didn't have an ability to stop this. I'm so frustrated because this is something where talking about Josh at EPC down in Louisiana, Louisiana is the most powerful state in the union right now in Washington D.C. You've got the Republicans in a trifecta and you have the Speaker of the House, and you have Steve Scalise in the Senate who are incredibly powerful, and they're choosing to let [00:37:30] these people in North Louisiana basically not have Internet access or to have to pay much more for an inferior product

Evan Feinman (37:36):
Rather than just No, I mean, that's the thing is Speaker Johnson needs to go talk to Veneeth Iyengar, and that should be true. Look, every member of Congress, go talk to your state broadband office. If you Republican, and if you've got a Republican governor that's somebody, you're a Republican governor appointed, go talk to them. You don't need to believe Evan [00:38:00] Feinman. You don't need to believe Chris Mitchell. Go talk to them. They will tell you in private, they may not be allowed to tell you in public that this is real bad, but they will tell you in a meeting that is very bad. There is no state broadband director who thinks these are good changes. Not one of 'em, Democrat or Republican.

Christopher Mitchell (38:14):
Yeah. Well, thank you Evan, for jumping on with us so quickly, and I'm sure we'll be in touch again as we see how all of the different challenges ripple through the system.

Evan Feinman (38:26):
Yeah. Thank you for your attention to it. Chris. You've been [00:38:30] beating this drum and it's really important and your voice is critical, so thank you for continuing to work on the issues.

Ry Marcattilio (38:37):
We have transcripts for this and other podcasts available at muninetworks.org/broadbandbits. Email us at podcast@muninetworks.org with your ideas for the show. Follow Chris on Twitter, his handles @CommunityNets. Follow muninetworks.org stories on Twitter: the handles @muninetworks. Subscribe to this and other podcasts from ILSR, including [00:39:00] Building Local Power, Local Energy Rules, and the Composting for Community Podcast. You can access them anywhere you get your podcasts. You can catch the latest important research from all of our initiatives if you subscribe to our monthly newsletter @ILSR.org. While you're there, please take a moment to donate your support in any amount. Keeps us going. Thank you to Arnie Huseby for the song, Warm Duck Shuffle, licensed through Creative Commons. This was the Community Broadband Bits podcast. [00:39:30] Thanks for listening.