The Biden appointee who headed a $42.5 billion program to provide broadband internet access in rural America, which hooked up exactly ZERO homes in three years, has quit in a huff. Democrat apparatchik Evan Feinman resigned Sunday and left behind a blistering, counterfactual, and self-serving letter blaming Elon Musk, “Stranding all or part of rural America with worse internet so that we can make the world’s richest man even richer is yet another in a long line of betrayals by Washington.”

Apparently, Feinman's departure was preciptiated by Commerce Secretary Howard Luttnick's intention to change the focus of the program from laying fiber optic cable to providing rural internet service, “Under the revamped BEAD program, all Americans will receive the benefit of the bargain that Congress intended.  We’re going to deliver high-speed internet access, and we will do it efficiently and effectively at the lowest cost to taxpayers.”

Feinman joined the Biden administration in 2022 from the administration of Virginia Governor Ralph Northam to head the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment Program (BEAD). BEAD was established in 2021 with funding authorized by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. The program was supposed to provide internet access to underserved and rural areas, but to date, it has done nothing.

BEAD fell upon hard times almost immediately. Not only was it managed with an incompetence that rivaled that of Biden's electric vehicle charging stations (Joe Biden's Electric Vehicle Charging Station Boondoggle Gets the Baby Seal Treatment – RedState), but it was also focused on a technology that was inappropriate for many rural areas and rapidly becoming outmoded. A focus on fiber-optic delivery meant that service providers were facing high downstream maintenance costs per user when satellite service, like Starlink, provided sufficient speed at a fraction of the cost.

That, of course, was the problem. Elon Musk's Starlink runs the best satellite wireless network. Naturally, Feinman's operation shut Starlink out of the competition because the speeds did not meet BEAD's requirements. 

Christine Hallquist, executive director of the Vermont Community Broadband Board, the administering agency for BEAD in the state, said Starlink’s service is currently too slow for BEAD, but the company is expecting to support faster speeds within the coming year after launching larger satellites into orbit.

“The existing Starlink technologies do not qualify for the BEAD program, but they’re upgrading to a new set of satellites that will qualify,” Hallquist said. “They’re supposed to be ready in time.”

The fact that Starlink was shut out of bidding on coverage, despite everyone knowing it would achieve the required upload/download speed in less than a year. At the same time, broadband and cellular companies were allowed to bid despite having no infrastructure in place and potentially years of work ahead before service was available seemed a bit odd. Senators Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), and Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.) called out Biden's "Broadband Czar" Kamala Harris for turning the program into a welfare program for cable companies instead of focusing on the mission.

As Feinman inadvertently points out in his screed, making the program "tech neutral" will disadvantage fiber optic companies and price wireless providers out of the market. One of the "impacts" he predicts is that "The wireless industry will be, effectively, shut out of the BEAD program. There will be few, if any, locations above any new cost limit that will be able to be more cheaply served by fixed wireless than low-earth satellites."

Here's the full email. Feinman's term ended and he was not reappointed. The Commerce Dept. is still weighing how it will change BEAD, but its stated preference for a low-cost, "tech neutral" use of funds could mean billions more for satellite operators like Starlink.

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— Craig Silverman (@craigsilverman.bsky.social) March 16, 2025 at 11:46 AM

Hilariously, Feinman claims the changes considered by Luttnick will slow things down from the "no progress" status his program achieved, “Shovels could already be in the ground in three states, and they could be in the ground in half the country by the summer without the proposed changes to project selection.” If "shovels could already be in th ground in three states," then why weren't said "shovels in the ground" in December?

There are two key points to this event. First, it highlights the extent to which Joe Biden's economic program had nothing to do with helping Americans and everything to do with funneling money into various constituencies. This program is just like his electric vehicle charging program and, though not as corrupt but as inept and wasteful as EPA's Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund; see EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin Finds the $20 Billion 'Gold Bars' the Biden Administration Tried to Jettison – RedState and Et Tu, Stacey? Stacey Abrams Linked to a $2 Billion Environmental Grant Rolled Up by DOGE – RedState. Biden, and the lapdogs in Congress, were quite willing to spend you and your children into penury to reward his friends.

The second key point is a looming strategic threat to Trump's second term. It is no accident that Feinman blamed Elon Musk for the change in focus of BEAD. Musk's wealth, his companies, and his influence in the White House is a pressure point the left will try to exploit. So far they haven't been successful, but we're only 60 days into Trump's administration.