Evan Feinman directed a $42.5 billion broadband interest, access and deployment (Bead) program designed to bring high-speed internet access to rural areas. ProPublica’S Craig Silverman. Silverman shares screenshots of ON in emails sent to employees BrucekyFeinman warned that the changes proposed by the new administration “can enable slower technology to pay for households at higher rates and at higher costs to line up the pockets of Elon Musk.
Bead was founded in 2021, and new Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick recently announced The Ministry of Commerce will overhaul the planHe said that because the last government handled it, “this did not connect a person to the internet.” exist statementLutnick called for a “technologically neutral stance” that would eliminate the preference for faster fiber connections and open the door to the transfer to satellite internet, as Elon Musk’s Starlink offers. Lutnick also slams the “wake-up task, preference for certain technologies, and heavy regulations.”
In an email shared on Sunday, Feinman urged colleagues to speak out to remove “unnecessary requirements” but warned against transferring from fiber. The most important thing, he wrote:
The new administration appears to want to make changes to ignore the clear direction set by Congress, reduce the number of U.S. homes and businesses that get fiber connections, and increase the number of satellite connections. The extent of this shift remains unknown, but regardless of scale, it has done harm to rural and small-town America. The internet stranded in all or part of the rural American country so that we can make the richest people in the world richer, a series of betrayals in Washington.
