BEAD Under Threat: Fiber, Satellites, and the Fight for the Future of Rural Internet Access - Episode 643 of the Community Broadband Bits Podcast

Christopher Mitchell (00:11):
Welcome to another episode of the Community Broadband Bits podcast. I'm Christopher Mitchell at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance in St. Paul Minnesota, and today I have on a very special guest, we've got Evan Feinman, who is the former BEAD director. That's the broadband equity [00:00:30] and oh, I always

Sean Gonsalves (00:32):
Access access and deployment.

Christopher Mitchell (00:33):
Access and deployment. Everyone knows it but me. I can never remember it, but you all know what that is. He's also a former Executive Director of the Tobacco Region Revitalization Commission, which we've talked about in the deeper past. Welcome to the show, Evan.

Evan Feinman (00:48):
Hey, thanks for having me. Really appreciate being here.

Christopher Mitchell (00:50):
I appreciate you coming on. We're doing this again with very light editing. I don't know if people have noticed the news is moving quickly and so we didn't [00:01:00] want to take time to run it through editing. We're going to more or less go live and to help me run it, I've got Sean Gonsalves, our associate director for communications on the Community Broadband Networks program at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance.

Evan Feinman (01:13):
Did you get all that on a business card or no?

Sean Gonsalves (01:17):
Well, actually yeah, it is on a business card. It fits. Got to have the right,

Christopher Mitchell (01:20):
There's nothing, there's no waste space left. Alright, we're going to dive right in and I wanted to say that this is a show most of the audience is deeply familiar with [00:01:30] BEAD and how NTIA got BEAD from Congress because of Congress's frustrations with past failures. I think we'll be talking candidly about some of that as Evan referenced it in his letter of resignation or letter of warning, however you want to take that. But I want to start off by just asking Evan, what is happening right now to the best of your knowledge with the BEAD program at NTIA?

Evan Feinman (01:59):
So [00:02:00] there's a lot of ways to answer that. To answer the most direct version of the question, what is happening with the BEAD program at NTIA big deal and not a lot. The big deal is the team at NTIA is still working with the secretary's office to come up with new guidance to reconfigure [00:02:30] the BEAD program to effectively to implement the directive that they got from Secretary Lutnick, which was to increase the use of satellite and decrease the use of fiber in the program sort of period. The way in which they're doing that is last I heard, and this could be somewhat out of date, I'm no longer there is they're contemplating taking away from states the authority to set their own extremely [00:03:00] high cost per location threshold, which is the point at which states can stop funding a fiber only project and start funding whatever connectivity means they want to use, and also reconfigure the cascade of technology preference, which used to go fiber.

(03:18):
Then other reliable, which is just kind of fixed wireless and hybrid fiber coax networks and then alternate tech like low earth orbit satellites and instead say low earth orbit satellites are directly in competition [00:03:30] with hybrid fiber coax and fixed wireless service and that was basically the status quo when I left. It remains the status quo because my understanding is that the secretary's office has not made any decisions about how they want to proceed beyond kind of that high level guidance. The other way to answer your question though is a whole [00:04:00] lot is going on just not at NTIA, so more than 40 states are accepting or evaluating applications right now, more than five states now have completed their work and are awaiting either the opportunity to submit a final proposal to NTIA or have already gotten approved final proposal and are waiting along with their crews, contractors and ISPs [00:04:30] to just be told they can start building. And so what we're seeing is amusingly for a program that was criticized for moving too slowly months and months of inactivity and paralysis in decision making, which is pretty frustrating.

Christopher Mitchell (04:50):
So I'm in Minnesota, I've been out in Montana a bunch, and Montana is one of the states where they set things up to be able to have shovels in the ground this summer because it doesn't work to put shovels in [00:05:00] the ground in

Evan Feinman (05:00):
November. No, the ground's frozen solid. I mean you can't get the shovel in. There's real risk that we're going to lose a whole building season and for the country north of I 40, right? There's a tremendous part of the country where there's a building season and particularly when we're constrained as we are by the limited capacity that the industry has to build at a given time, gosh, it makes a lot of sense to make sure that we can sort of [00:05:30] fire the starting pistol in a way that allows the northern part of the country to get building and then some of those crews to get deployed to the south once the building season ends up north. And so I along with the states are pretty disappointed. One of the things that we know to be true is that they are not letting done be done.

(05:52):
I think a lot of folks, particularly in this very clued in audience, would've seen, for example, Senator Shelley Moore Capito [00:06:00] from West Virginia's statement really coming out guns blazing and saying, let my state move forward. Well, that isn't what's happening. Secretary Lutnick met with the new governor of West Virginia, governor Morrisey, and we don't know what happened in that meeting, but what we do know is that when he came back out, he had a 90 day extension in West Virginia, which was done, which had an incredible universal fiber solution for every single West Virginia home and business ahead of schedule and 150, more than 150 million under [00:06:30] budget. They're going back and they're reworking it, and they're going to take fiber away from West Virginia homes and businesses and substitute it with LEO somehow. I think that's a horrible outcome. It also, it doesn't make a lot of sense.

Christopher Mitchell (06:46):
No, it's bad for everyone. I mean, it just means that in the future we're going to end up paying more to build out the fiber that could have already been started

Evan Feinman (06:55):
Or we'll just abandon those places. I mean, that's the other thing that happens is [00:07:00] when you have communities that are just left out of the opportunity to participate in economic prosperity, you look at the communities that didn't get rural electrification for long periods of time. You look at the communities that were left out of major transit and travel routes when we were planning where are the major state routes going to be, where are the interstates going to go earlier than that? You look at the communities that weren't served by railroad, what happened to those places? They did not join in the economic prosperity [00:07:30] that the folks who did have access to that infrastructure engaged in, and even worse, when you start talking property values, it's a direct hit. I mean, these become the least saleable, least valuable pieces of property by comparison in the country because folks are not going to buy property to live in full-time or to do productive economic activity that can't get online.

Sean Gonsalves (07:54):
When you were mentioning about looking like we're heading [00:08:00] in this direction of essentially funneling what would've been BEAD money for fiber projects to low earth, well LEO and the mechanism being the high cost location threshold, it seems, I'm wondering because there are a number of states that are all in on fiber. I know North Dakota is a state that wants to be a hundred percent fiber, and so I'm wondering should that shift what that [00:08:30] would mean in terms of percentage of what goes to fiber versus satellite?

Evan Feinman (08:35):
So it's hard to know exactly because the number matters the most here. If they come back and say, the highest you can set your extremely high cost per location threshold is 25 grand, that's not going to have a huge impact. There are very few locations that are over that per location, though it's worth noting when we talk about very low impact, that's [00:09:00] in the context of looking at the program from a hundred thousand feet. If it's 5%, that's some tens of thousands or you're going to watch me do math on the fly, which I should hesitate to do, but we also shouldn't diminish saying, oh, it's not that big a deal. We're only going to be sticking tens of thousands of families with inadequate service, right? That's not great. At the same time, if they set it at $2,500 a location [00:09:30] that's going to make the program primarily a LEO program, the majority of places can't be reached for that small amount of money and then doing some back of the envelope analysis at the states that we have actuals in and will sort of set Delaware aside. Nevada remember was 80% fiber, 10% fixed wireless, 10%, LEO, if you force everything over 5K, first of all, you hold everything static [00:10:00] so you set par, and that's not the reality we're dealing with. In reality, there's a dynamic pricing impact here and the people have the most flexibility to engage with that dynamic pricing or the LEOs because they don't have the same fixed cost concerns that terrestrial providers do.

(10:17):
What you would see is you'd switch from 80% fiber, 10% fixed wireless, 10% LEO to right about 30% fiber, 70% LEO 0% in Nevada. Wow. Louisiana [00:10:30] was 95% fiber, 2% LEO, 3% wireless. That goes to about 50 50, 50% fiber, 50% LEO, again,

Christopher Mitchell (10:41):
That's what I've been saying. The fixed wireless guys on Friday were telling me that was wrong about this. The thing is that when you change the model from a rational one, if one that we can argue about to one that is basically let's give money to LEO at the point at which you're effectively saying technologically, we're going to assume that terrestrial wireless [00:11:00] is as good as LEO, which I don't accept, but if we do make that at that point, it's much cheaper to do LEO, especially if you ignore the waiting lists and all the other problems with LEO.

Evan Feinman (11:09):
Well, yeah. There are a ton of problems that occur, so let me say first well, or wherever we are now in the conversation at this point that, look, the LEO Tech is a cool tech and it's an important tool to have in the toolbox. There are some locations for which it's the best option, and there are some applications [00:11:30] for which it's the only option, right? We're not going to trail a multim mile long spool of fiber out the back of jumbo jets when we're flying around the country. That doesn't work. Same ships on the ocean, same very remote locations, but what we've seen is that the Starlink network, which is the only extent LEO network serving directly to the customer right now as its business model, most of the time cruise is kind of right at the [00:12:00] cutoff for it's barely good enough, and in fact, we didn't too closely interrogate that because it was our only option for these very remote locations.

(12:09):
It's also very capacity constrained. It is not true that everybody who doesn't have service today could get on Starlink tomorrow, and so we wanted to reserve that capacity for the most remote locations, those places, and there's real risk that if you just let them apply anywhere and they're in competition with fiber and fixed wireless for suburban locations [00:12:30] that you've used up their capacity before you get to those most far-flung locations and you therefore can't serve them anymore. We've perpetuated the digital divide. The second thing is, and I think about this the most right now in the context of West Virginia, it costs a heck of a lot more. A fiber connection can be very cheap, but let's say it's 50 bucks a month, which is sort of a reasonable expectation for a fiber only connection. You stack content on top of it, it gets more expensive, but just get me online. What's the cheapest way you can get me online? 50 bucks and let's [00:13:00] leave out even the low cost programs that are either voluntary or not,

Christopher Mitchell (13:05):
And so I'll just throw out there that for people who are like, what is he talking about? A lot of the electric co-ops are doing 50, 60 bucks a month. The private local family companies often have an option around that. It may not be a gigabit, but some of 'em it is 60 bucks for a gigabit for some of 'em, so yeah, so let's

Evan Feinman (13:23):
Take past the fiber price. The Starling price is 120 bucks, and so you're talking about for a West Virginia family that [00:13:30] was going to have that $50 a month fiber, they're now looking at a $70 a month delta, and that's more than $800 a year. Now, I don't know what y'all have heard lately, but it turns out folks are actually not that wealthy in rural West Virginia and an extra 800 plus dollars a year after taxes out of that household budget, man, I mean that really hurts and

Christopher Mitchell (13:53):
Yeah, I can't believe it's West Virginia that we're talking about. Of all the places, and this is where Shelley Moore capital has been on point [00:14:00] because she knows that for years West Virginia has been screwed. It was screwed by Verizon, it got screwed by Frontier, it got screwed by Frontier in the AURA program, and now it got screwed in RDOF. It had no say over any of this stuff. It made some bad decisions, but in fact, the federal government kept giving them terrible options. We finally had one, and then what kills me is that the governor himself is a conspirator and taking it away, and then people are stuck with LEO, and then the topology of West Virginia [00:14:30] means that it's possibly the second, third, or fourth worst state overall for LEO coverage because of its geography,

Evan Feinman (14:37):
And that's before you even get into some of the edge cases for them, which is the national Radio Quiet Zone in the eastern part of West Virginia, which is super cool. By the way, radio astronomy amazing, something we should be supportive of, but no, you can't have Starling satellites beaming down at that radio receiver, that set of radio receivers. I don't have all of the details on it. I like astronomy, but I'm not an astronomer [00:15:00] a real, it's just a shame that we're messing up something that if you told me three years ago we were going to manage a fiber, an end-to-end fiber connection for every single home in business in West Virginia, by the way, again, I'm going to emphasize this more than $150 million under budget. What a triumph. The thing that's so confusing to this, to me about all of this is when the Trump administration came into office, I wrote a memo and I said, look, here's [00:15:30] my advice for how to move forward.

(15:33):
You've said a lot and your colleagues in Congress have said a lot about the woke aspects of beat. I actually don't think those were in any way, shape or form an issue with the program, but you do. That's fine. Here's a way you can waive all of them. You can make it entirely optional for states to engage in that kind of stuff and you can claim that you fixed the program, you can keep the program moving forward. You can spend the next three years going to ground breakings and fiber lightings and take credit for [00:16:00] having solved this problem, and it'll be a huge political win for the administration and it'll be a huge win for rural America. Instead, they've snatched victory from the jaws of defeat here

(16:12):
And they're doing this what Lutnick refers to as a thorough review, which would've been great. That's not what happened at all, right? The outcome was predetermined at the outset of the review and there's nothing being reviewed. The only thing that's happening is the team at NTIA has put forward a set of options and [00:16:30] they're awaiting a guidance from the secretary on where to set that so that they can then implement this in terms of the way to overhaul the program, and it's going to mean tremendous new costs because the private sector has spent back at the envelope, at least a quarter billion preparing and submitting these applications. That's all going to get lit on fire. They're going to have to reapply.

Sean Gonsalves (16:53):
I can imagine some electric co-ops in smaller provider saying, we're not going to do this [00:17:00] all over again if we have to.

Evan Feinman (17:02):
No, I mean, why would they? I mean, they engaged in good faith. Electric and telephone cooperatives are not capital rich entities.

Christopher Mitchell (17:11):
Well,

Evan Feinman (17:11):
That effectively nonprofits,

Christopher Mitchell (17:13):
I mean part of the issue that you face in Nevada, you mentioned the numbers, right, is that we're not saying, okay, the northern half of the state is all going to go LEO and the southern half will still have the ability to do fiber, right? Instead, you're taking a significant number of passings out of each of these [00:17:30] zones likely,

(17:31):
And that just kills the economics of it, and so you actually have a more significant impact than one might think by just changing the rules, but lemme ask you, your comments seem to think that this is a foregone conclusion at this point that they're going to go down that path. I'd been holding out hope that they still, whether it was because were enlightened themselves or because every governor, senator and US Rep from rural areas would say, don't do this, and they would actually listen to them. I was thinking that it [00:18:00] wasn't a definite. Now you seem to be pretty concerned that it's really going to happen.

Evan Feinman (18:04):
It's not done until it's done right, until the reason I am, look, I'm going to enjoy this conversation. I'm already enjoying this conversation. I would come on a podcast anytime, but the reason I'm being so outspoken is out of the hope that the administration does the right thing here and there's still a tremendous opportunity for them to do it. If you're listening, you can [00:18:30] blunt the impact of the midterm elections. You can significantly shore up support for congressional Republicans in endangered seats, and you can dramatically increase the president's standing as well as the rest of the administration standing in rural America by just getting out of the way and letting the BEAT program happen. Construction will be underway, folks will start getting service, but we're burning time, and I understand that. People say, oh, you had four years and you didn't get it done. [00:19:00] It's like, yes, we can talk about why that is, that there was a process that had to get there, but the idea that it took you too long to get to the finish line, therefore we are going to prevent you from crossing the finish line that you're at now is not a logical conclusion.

(19:15):
There are construction crews waiting. They could be building today if they were told they can go, so let 'em go. Let's get building.

Sean Gonsalves (19:26):
It's almost as if we are [00:19:30] on track and I say we with air quotes to give rural America worse Internet to make the richest man in the world richer,

Christopher Mitchell (19:39):
Written down. I mean, we can even leave that out. I am deeply concerned about the corruption of this administration. Frankly, I'm concerned about the corruption of every administration. We're in the living in the present currently. I want to say even if we just leave Elon out of it, I think the argument that you've made, Evan is really good [00:20:00] tempted to, I want to come back to low earth orbit satellites, and I feel like what people are ignoring about another weakness of them if we have time at the end, but I do want to spend a little bit of time on this because on my show connect this where we talk about this, there's a number of people who are frequently like, well, the Biden administration should have gotten it done. We know that when administrations change, priorities change whether you're a city council or whether you're the federal government, it's on you for not having got the checks out the door six months earlier, and so I'm curious [00:20:30] how you respond to that.

Evan Feinman (20:31):
Well, yeah. I mean, let's talk about a couple of things here. First, rural electrification, which is a similar endeavor, get a copper or then aluminum wired. Every home and business in the United States was passed along in 1939. I'm relatively certain none of the activities that are described by today's Republicans is woke or being undertaken by the federal government in the [00:21:00] 1930s and forties. Really?

Christopher Mitchell (21:02):
Right? No review the

Evan Feinman (21:03):
Opposite,

Christopher Mitchell (21:04):
Right? No permitting, no review. They just put the poles up and moved.

Evan Feinman (21:07):
Oh yeah, they were plowing under corn and throwing a couple of bucks on a farmer's porch and being like, you're welcome, and moving on. By 19 49, 10 years later, they hadn't connected half of the locations they were trying to connect. They didn't finish up until the seventies. So first, let's just say this is a big complicated thing. We're used to being able to tap our phones and order [00:21:30] something from Amazon and have it on our porch in a few hours, but you can't do that with a national piece of infrastructure that's going to serve millions and millions of people. That's sort of 0.1. Let's just talk about the actual plan field. Point two is the reason it's such a problem, the reason it's such a challenging problem is because every time you chip away at the problem without solving it, you make it harder to solve. And the best way, and I'm sorry that there's no super pithy [00:22:00] quick response, but just so that everybody understands it, and I think this audience knows this already, but if you've got a hundred locations in a county, 50 in a town and then 50 scattered around and you say it's going to be a hundred bucks to connect everybody in the county, well, if you're trying to go fast, you say, well, who can make me the best offer?

(22:16):
And ISP will absolutely come to you and say, we'll connect everybody in that town for 30 bucks. And you go, well, that's great to connect to everybody. It's a dollar a home. We can connect 50 homes for 30 bucks. Except what happens is after you fund that project, it's still 70 [00:22:30] bucks to connect the remaining 50, except you've screwed up the economics of it right now. Your per home cost is much higher. You, by the way, have now funded one ISP to come into the middle of the county, so they're probably the only ones who you can work with, so they know it too. So you're over a barrel, and so you got to do two things to really solve the problem. First is you can't be the federal government. It just doesn't work. The nation's too big and too complicated. You got to get out closer.

(22:54):
You got to be in dialogue with communities. You got to be working through states, and that was one of the things that the program was set up to do, but [00:23:00] a majority of states didn't have broadband offices, so we had to upscale the state broadband offices. We had to get 'em going to get 'em ready to roll. Not everybody's Minnesota. The second thing that we had to do was align projects to close the divide all the way. If you stop halfway, you have that escalating costs problem where the people you leave out are the worst off. And so you had to run this process to get every location on the map covered before you start building, or you really run the risk of leaving people on the wrong side of the digital divide. That took [00:23:30] a while. It took a while, both because of the way the law was written, which I'm not going to entirely defend.

(23:37):
I would not have drafted the infrastructure investment in jobs X feed portions in the way that they were drafted. That said, it is an, that can lead to a solution that closes the digital divide. The other thing that I'll, so that's all that, right? That's why we went through the amount of time that we went through. I will own that there was maybe not a policy error, [00:24:00] but a political judgment error, which was that this was a foreseeable criticism, and what we could have done was created some kind of fast track carve out to say, look, if you want to do some project, we want you to send us just right with your initial proposal, send us three projects that are going to be this. By the way, this would've been more expensive, so this would purely be to sort of hedge [00:24:30] out this criticism, but maybe that's worth it, right? People can disagree about this. It

Christopher Mitchell (24:34):
Would be politics over what saves the taxpayer dollars.

Evan Feinman (24:37):
Yes, but it would've avoided this criticism, and we could have said, look, as long as you're connecting two x the percentage of outstanding BSLs with these projects as you are the percentage of your funding that you're expending, we'll just assume that you can manage that in the context of your broader build. What we were always worried about was that folks would overspend on early projects, and then we wind up not having enough resources to close the digital divide on a state by basis. And so [00:25:00] we could have done that, and that would've allowed us to sort of push off some of this criticism. We could also have just been more willing to accept bad outcomes. We could have said, and we already did do this a lot, I mean, my staff used to laugh at me when I'd say, look, people get the state government they elect when states would make decisions that we thought were boneheaded, but we could have done less of trying to save [00:25:30] the states from themselves and just said, okay, we don't think that's going to work, and we're going to go on record saying we don't think that's going to work, but here you go.

(25:36):
It's your call. That was not something that the prior administration was willing to do, and I think that was right. If we have a really good faith belief that taxpayer dollars are going to be wasted or that an approach that estate's taking is not going to succeed, I think you do need to work with them and say, look, we're not going to approve. Ultimately, it was Assistant Secretary Davidson's call, but we'd say, we're not going to approve this approach because [00:26:00] in one instance of a major state, we were like, explain this to us, and they said, well, we can't. And we said, well, we can't. We're talking about hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars in this instance, more than a billion dollars. We said, look, we can't, can't in good conscience approve a process that you yourself can't describe, and that costs close to eight months going back and forth with that state trying to get 'em to come together, because that's the other thing people tend to forget is that the majority of this was not [00:26:30] within N T's ability to control.

(26:33):
We were going back and forth with states because states we're not producing initial proposals that either complied with federal rules, like we had multiple states hold and say, we're not going to do a low cost service option, even though the law was incredibly explicit that there must be a low cost service option. We had states that were saying, we're not going to follow federal grants rules. Well, I don't [00:27:00] didn't write those rules. I don't think all those rules are smart, but they are the law, and so I don't have the ability, I can't recommend approval of a proposal that violates a federal law or violates a federal regulation. It would be nice if Congress had given us the authority to say and submit for public comment, a set of regulations that you think are silly or that aren't productive. I got a long list, right? There's lots of stuff that the federal government does that doesn't make a lot of sense, but breaking the law [00:27:30] was not on the list of things we were going to do.

Christopher Mitchell (27:32):
So I just want to say before, Sean, I'll leave this to you, Sean, but I'll just say I'm famous among our small group of 10 people for losing bets over and over and over again. I thought states were going to bully you, and I thought, not you personally, but I thought NTIA was going to say, alright, you know what? We're going to do the best we can, but if you're not going to follow the rules, what are we going to do? But you stood up to 'em, and so I just wanted to note that I bet against you in every opportunity.

Evan Feinman (27:57):
Well, I would love to [00:28:00] be included in that group and be making bets against you, but the thing I'll say there is, yeah, I mean, we weren't everybody involved in the BEAD program from Secretary Raimondo and her senior advisors, Kevin Gallagher and SanMar, Alan Davidson, Sarah Morris, and then everybody at NTIA, Phil Murphy in the front office, and Lucas, Peter, Zach, who I don't think a lot of people know, but who's a real hero.

Christopher Mitchell (28:29):
I worked with [00:28:30] him at National Next Century Cities.

Evan Feinman (28:33):
Yeah, no, Lucas Lucas is one of my favorite people. He's incredibly talented. He's incredibly organized. We can just keep naming people like Russ Hanser, Nick Alexander, Amanda Martin, just brilliant, brilliant, brilliant, amazing people. Courtney Dozier, Kyle Rosner, crystal Ivy, everybody there really, really, really cared about them mission, and that meant that we wanted to get the job done [00:29:00] for everybody. And that's one of the other things that I think is so wild about the other dialogue that's going on right now about the federal government and federal employees. I didn't see, I believe they exist, the federal government is vast, but I didn't see the lazy, unproductive federal bureaucrat when I was at NTIA. What I saw was people really consistently working nights and weekends. 60 hour weeks were easy [00:29:30] weeks, and I had to have a lot of conversations, honestly, with leadership, Doug Kink off and Alan, and even up to the secretary's office that was less interested in hearing this part and say, look, the team has really been working incredibly hard for years now, and we actually need to talk about doing some work to lighten their load because burnout is very real. And I mean, they've gotten a bit of a break here, [00:30:00] a lot of inactivity, but by and large, they were really pushing very, very, very hard.

Sean Gonsalves (30:05):
Yeah, I was just going to say, and we don't need to spend much time talking about this, but the two things that just drive me absolutely crazy about this criticism about not one household has been connected with BEAT funds yet is leaving out the part that a bulk of the time was to deal with these inaccurate maps.

(30:27):
And

(30:27):
That is extremely frustrating to pretend [00:30:30] as if that wasn't a big reason why it took such a length of time to go through the challenge process, et cetera, to get more accurate maps. I mean, I think it's kind of scandalous at the FCC for years, year and half, year

Christopher Mitchell (30:44):
Half. Right. Let me ask the question this way though, because given this too much thought, I've obsessed over it, and I feel like in an ideal world, if you could go back in time, and let me just say that I, candidly, [00:31:00] for instance, NTIA, you're not involved with you, but NTIA ignored the statutory deadlines for TBCP, not that they didn't have good reasons, I'm sure, and not that they wouldn't justify that it was done, but there's times in which statute is more or less required to follow by the letter, and other times when it's forgiven, if you bend it, if you could go back, I wonder if you would basically say, FCC Hass given us data and it's not great, but it's a good proxy. We're going to use the data that the FCC's given us rather than giving [00:31:30] the FCC 16, 18 months to give us data that is, I'll say more precise and less accurate. Now, at the same time, you would not have recovered all that time because you were hiring a ton of people and getting them trained up. The states were trying to find people to hire and get them trained up, and so it's not like you could recover all of that time

Evan Feinman (31:49):
And so well, and states didn't want to do it. I mean, the thing we should note is a year and a half in when we finally got the FCC map, which it's also worth noting [00:32:00] it's not okay, but it is an acceptable outcome legally to try and fail to meet a statutory deadline. But at no point did I ever see anybody say, well, we're just going to ignore the statute. We're not going to do what the statute says. So with TVCP, it simply wasn't possible to meet that deadline, is my understanding. And so they didn't because they couldn't, but

(32:22):
Impossibility is different from just saying, well, we're just going to let it slide. So that's sort of 0.1. But yeah, I mean, the other thing to note though is [00:32:30] when we did make allocation and start the clock ticking on initial proposals a year and a half in, we got letters from more than a dozen states telling us we were going too fast and encouraging us to wait longer. I mean, the states were not ready.

Christopher Mitchell (32:47):
So I think that's the answer then, is that there's a lot of things that I might have, I shouldn't say a lot of things. There are a few things in which I feel like you might've done things differently. I don't know that we don't end up in the same spot for the same reason that this is a program. [00:33:00] It's supposed to be the cleanup program. So you have these other programs that are working through, that are deploying networks that don't get any credit from Ezra Klein. He doesn't know anything about technology, and I always say this, but I followed that guy so closely. I have a tremendous respect for him, more than a lot of my allies do. And one thing that's been clear, because I've never missed one of his podcasts ever since he started the weeds on Vox, is that he doesn't know anything about technology. He makes that very clear, and it just drives me crazy that, but anyway, he, yeah,

Evan Feinman (33:30):
[00:33:30] No, he's wrong about BEAD in large part. He's not wrong about BEAD entirely, but he's wrong about BEAD in large part. I think he'd be willing to own that. In part though, it is worth noting that what we're talking about are flaws in the largely lack of flaws in execution. What he would say to be a little fair to him is, well, yeah, but I'm not criticizing NTIA. I'm criticizing [00:34:00] Democrats and the left broadly, and

(34:03):
That would include the people who drafted the bill and the people at FCC who didn't get the map out in a timely fashion, et cetera, et cetera. And so I think that broader criticism is a little fairer is still true, that there just wasn't a responsible scenario whereby millions of people could have been hooked up within one four year term, [00:34:30] during which there were already millions of people being hooked up by programs that were already underway. You had to completely overhaul the model to move to state leadership and a new data and location-based theory. It is also worth noting though states were in control of all of this. The states that wanted to go fast did. And so the fact that Louisiana, Delaware, and Nevada all got the job done on time means the rest of the states could [00:35:00] have done that too. Had they been so inclined

Sean Gonsalves (35:04):
Possibly with regards to Ezra, it would've also had been nice if he had noted the small footnote that there were other programs that you just alluded to, the Rescue Plan Act funds. I mean, what something like 25 billion from our rescue plan funds. Yeah,

Evan Feinman (35:18):
Many programs we were aware of. That was the other thing was Joey, we who ran the CRF funds would say, look, these are successive waves.

Christopher Mitchell (35:29):
CPF I think the [00:35:30] Capital Project Fund

Evan Feinman (35:32):
Yeah, Capital Projects Fund, sorry, but who's now over at Shelby? Great outcome for both Shelby and Joey. But we knew that was happening and states would say, look, we got to do CPF between now and this future date. And so that's why we are planning to do BEAD later. And I think that was a reasonable choice for those states to make.

Christopher Mitchell (35:58):
One of the things that drove, [00:36:00] we're cruising toward the end right now. I don't know if you're, so I was just in New Mexico and New Mexico has one of the larger gaps of needs with just a lot of very rural, expensive locations, and they're doing what they can with the money. They're always going to have to do more. And I think the state has recognized that. I'll say that to the credit of their legislature, they and their state office have made it clear that they'll have to do more. I've always hated the [00:36:30] idea that this was the last program along those lines. And I'm just curious how you think about it, because I know that the Biden administration always wanted to use this framing that it rubbed me the wrong way Internet for all, and this is the end, but how did you think about how we were going to clean up for all of the failures of the mapping and

Evan Feinman (36:47):
Whatnot? So I think this would be the end of major combat operations in the war against the digital divide, right? Well,

Christopher Mitchell (36:58):
The war against the lack of infrastructure. [00:37:00] I

Evan Feinman (37:00):
Think that's the way to characterize it. When rural electrification finished in the 1970s, that didn't mean nobody ever needed to string another power line again. It simply meant that there no longer exists, these vast swaths of unserved territory. Now, there's two big things that are going to drive the need for more government intervention in the space, recognizing that there's a market failure. It'll never make economic sense for a pure for-profit to build a lot of these locations. The first is development will [00:37:30] continue and there will be new locations that are created and they need to be hooked up to the Internet. And the second is that a set of programs, especially, especially especially RO, are going to have failed projects, and there will need to be cleanup of those failed projects. BEAT will have some too, right? I mean, you try to drive that percentage low, but a low percentage of failed projects in a 42 billion endeavor is still a lot of projects.

(37:50):
And of course, our office is seeing a very high percentage of failed projects. And so that kind of cleanup work will still need to happen. But I do think it's fair to think of it as [00:38:00] BEAD if allowed to be BEAD, if the administration doesn't make this radical change to it really would be kind of the primary, it would end the big thrust of, Hey, we've got to keep closing the digital divide. It would instead be, let's clean up the failed Roff projects and let's attend to any remaining gaps or newly created gaps. And that, I think is a fair way to characterize it if it works, if they let it move forward.

Christopher Mitchell (38:25):
Sean, any last questions?

Sean Gonsalves (38:28):
Not really. Other than just if you had any [00:38:30] sense of when

Christopher Mitchell (38:33):
Will we know? Yeah, exactly.

Evan Feinman (38:35):
When will we know? Is

(38:36):
There, well, the team at NTIA needs to hear from the secretary's office because it's really being driven out of his office. What they're going to do. Are they going to grandfather in these three states that we're already finished? Are they going to add to that list at least two additional states that have finished? Now, the quiet answer to that seems to be that [00:39:00] the decision is no given that they told Morrisey something that led him to go back and do more activity on what was otherwise a finished product. I have heard the end of this month, I've heard June, I've heard July. So I simply don't know, and I don't think they know. I mean, I don't think there's a plan, and I recognize that the last few weeks have been pretty darn busy weeks for Secretary Lutnick, right? I mean, there are people [00:39:30] better postured than the three of us to talk about the tariff adventure. But that's been going on, and that's very squarely the Secretary of Commerce and the Secretary of the Treasury's baby. And that's something that's important to do. I'll point out though, that's always the case, right? When you're a United States Cabinet Secretary, you need to walk and chew a bubblegum and juggle and

Christopher Mitchell (39:56):
Right, although I'll say I think you are being very charitable. I [00:40:00] just saw in ours technical story on Friday about scientists that are scrubbing toilets and trying to figure out how they can remove hazardous waste from their labs because the secretary himself has to personally approve allocations of more than a hundred thousand dollars. And there's no way to run's not that way. You run a battleship, let alone an entire department of the federal government. It's lunacy,

Evan Feinman (40:19):
Right? Well, it's also worth noting there are no such decisions being made. So all of the funds we're allocated were obligated to the states at the approval of their initial proposals. And so [00:40:30] those obligations have already taken place. And so the thing that we're rating on now for those three states is merely approval of a revised budget. This is not a new expenditure, and in fact, it should already have happened. It is complete madness, and there's a lot of stuff going on that's pretty wild. Early on when I was still there, there was the spreadsheet, and the spreadsheet had all of your instances of forbidden words [00:41:00] that were in your program. And I said, the top question is, do you have DEI in your program? And I said, no. And the first sort of thing that came back to us was what says equity right in the name of the program?

(41:16):
And I said, okay. So Congress named it, not us. And by the way, the inequity they're talking about isn't the kind you don't like, it's that some people have Internet and some people don't, and we're fixing that. And then they came back [00:41:30] and they said, well, I assume they just control ept it. The word inclusion is in your nofo over and over again. And I had to say, thanks mom, son of an English and literature teacher. I said, yeah, yeah. That's a form of the verb to include. Meaning inclusion of served locations in an approved project is permissible so long as they don't exceed 20%. Right. Again, that isn't what you meant, and that is the level of discourse that was going [00:42:00] on, at least when I was still there. There is not a plan beyond what we've seen.

Sean Gonsalves (42:09):
Yeah. Well, the one thing that in addition to finding out what these changes will be or maybe is the impact that it might have on the scoring rubric for the bidding process in states and whether or not they'll have to redo the whole bidding process all over again.

Evan Feinman (42:23):
I don't know how you don't, if you change the rules, if you say, everybody submit bids and here's the rules, and then you change the rules at a minimum, [00:42:30] you've got to let people go rework their bids and you got to reevaluate 'em. And that's going to take time. And by the way, if they change the scoring rubric, they've got to change their initial proposal, which means they've got to resubmit their initial proposal to NTIA. You'd hope there'd be a way to fast track those changes, but they've got to do it, and the states need time to think about it. I mean, it took them a while to decide how to do this, and it does get complicated really fast. I mean, does a cost for location, do we need to get the ISPs to break down location by location? Is it okay for it to be an averaged cost across [00:43:00] what one project unit, the entire project, all of somebody's projects across the state?

(43:05):
What are the answers to these questions? All of those will have to be answered because we're talking about billions of dollars, and we have to be serious when we do that. Everything seems easy until you start getting into the weeds. The easy problems all got solved a long time ago. And so most of the problems that the government deals with now are hard and complicated. And this is one where it looks easy from a long way off, and the closer you get, the more complicated it gets. And so I in particular just want to emphasize [00:43:30] though that there is still time to do this the right way. They could say, nevermind, let's go. Let's do the woke stuff, which by the way, is what congressional Republicans have been pushing for the whole time. I mean, you talk about Representative Guthrie, the chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. His district is rural, I think Kentucky. He's really been a leader on these issues, and this is not what he wanted. This is not what [00:44:00] congressional Republicans wanted. They wanted to get rid of the woke stuff and then get shovels in the ground and get building, and I think that would be fine. Let's do that. But what's going on right now is just, it's a real shame, and I'm still hopeful, though not optimistic that the administration will come to the right conclusion.

Christopher Mitchell (44:23):
Well, Evan, I really appreciate your time coming on here and having this conversation. I do want to take [00:44:30] the opportunity to invite you back. I'd love to talk more about some of the things, just history wise. How does one staff up for this? I'd like to talk about, I mean, close to Sean in my heart is how you looked at the congressional demand that you states not discriminate against cities, building infrastructure and things like that. There's a lot of things I'd love to cover with you in a future show.

Evan Feinman (44:54):
I would love to talk that through with you. My schedule is a lot more flexible these days. [00:45:00] I'm doing a little bit of consulting. If somebody needs a little help with their engagement with BEAD or anything else, I'm out here. Let me if you need me. But that still does lead me a lot of flexibility, so really happy to join you all anytime.

Christopher Mitchell (45:14):
Great. Terrific. Thank you. Thank you.

Ry Marcattilio (45:19):
We have transcripts for this and other podcasts available at muni networks.org/broadbandbits. Email us@podcastmuninetworks.org with your ideas for the show. [00:45:30] Follow Chris on Twitter, his handles at Community Nets, follow muni networks.org. Stories on Twitter that handles at muni networks. Subscribe to this and other podcasts from ILSR, including 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 [00:46:00] a moment to donate your support in any amount. Keeps us going. Thank you to Arne Hughes Beef for the song Warm Duck Shuffle, licensed through creative comments. This was the Community Broadband Bits podcast. Thanks for listening.