While it was the Republican Gov. Jeff Landry Administration that won the footrace in rolling out high-speed Internet access in all of Louisiana, give the Republican Pres. Donald Trump Administration an assist.
Regarding the Broadband, Equity, Access, and Deployment program intended to bring this connectivity across the country stuffed into one of the many spending bills forced through Congress by Trump’s Democrat predecessor, in November Louisiana announced it was the first state to receive approval of its plan. At the time, the Trump Administration attributed this milestone to the “state broadband office’s efforts to rein in excessive costs, use diverse technologies, and collaborate effectively with the private sector demonstrate the Benefit of the Bargain reforms in action.”
Key to that alacrity was the referenced reforms. The original program, the intent of which already was becoming stale because about 99 percent of households had high-speed access by 2021, featured stipulations created by Democrats that made it more of a handout on the basis of politicized considerations, with rules giving liberal special interests and states run by those ideologues the ability to direct the money to favored groups, to subsidize favored delivery systems, and to increase the ability to regulate the Internet.
The reforms announced in June after Trump entered office include instituting a technology-neutral approach (terrestrial providers had been favored), removing burdensome labor and employment requirements, cancelling climate change requirements, ending net neutrality requirements, removing diversity, equity, and inclusion coordination requirements, excising municipal provision favoritism, stopping backdoor rate regulation, and streamlining environmental reviews. This lowered rollout costs for all by jettisoning things like rate subsidization, equity carveouts, and deliberate union and local government participation, as well as opened up a larger range of less expensive technologies for use. This allowed for demanding greater cost-sharing among private providers, which altogether ended up saving nationally $21 billion.
In Louisiana, the results were dramatic. The average cost for each new household or business connected fell to $3,943 from $5,245. The most expensive project had run at $120,000 per connection under the previous rules but the new ones brought the cost down to $7,547 per connection. Reductions like that were accomplished by farming out the majority of difficult projects to SpaceX, which because of its lower cost provision was willing to put more of its own resources into the task. Indeed, while the terrestrial projects had a grant to grantee ratio of $1.43, the SpaceX projects were just $0.35, and even as it had a majority of projects it only took up 1.64 percent of all grant money allocated.
Given the ball, the Landry Administration scored before all other states. No doubt affinity with the philosophy behind the reforms aided in a swift response that hopes to wrap everything up by Feb. 2. Landry’s and Trump’s free-market, light-government approach wins yet again.
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