As the White House transforms into a Tesla showroom, a departing Commerce Department official issued a blistering warning Sunday about how another company owned by the richest man in the world stands to benefit at rural Americans’ expense.
Evan Feinman was previously in charge of the Broadband, Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program, which aims to expand broadband access in unserved or underserved parts of the country. On Sunday, according to Politico, Feinman sent a farewell email to colleagues, noting that Friday was his last day, and urging them to not allow the BEAD program to become coopted by Starlink, Elon Musk’s satellite internet service.
“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,” Feinman wrote, according to Politico.
The rebuke came weeks after the Department of Commerce announced it was overhauling Biden administration rules for awarding grants through the BEAD program. Where the prior rules gave preference to broadband projects relying on fiber-optic cable, the new rules would take a “tech neutral approach,” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told The New York Times. The Wall Street Journal previously reported that the change could boost Starlink’s cut of the BEAD pie from around $4 billion to up to $20 billion.
Beyond concerns about self-dealing between the Trump administration and the president’s biggest booster, broadband experts have also argued that the new rules could ultimately lead to worse internet service for Americans, given the differences in reliability between satellite and fiber internet. Others have argued that the rule change is needlessly slowing down states who have already spent years developing their plans, and now may need to go back to the drawing board.
In his email, Feinman reportedly called out Louisiana, Delaware, and Nevada, in particular, as states that were ready to begin building out their broadband networks but have been in “limbo” since the start of this administration. “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,” Feinman wrote.
Meanwhile, Starlink is at the center of a separate controversy over the Federal Aviation Administration’s reported plans to cancel a $2.4 billion deal with Verizon to upgrade air traffic control infrastructure and route the contract, instead, to the Musk-owned company. On Monday, The Guardian reported a group of congressional Democrats wrote a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi, as well as the Department of Transportation’s acting inspector general, asking them to investigate whether Musk “has participated in any particular matter in which he has a financial interest, which would violate the criminal conflict-of-interest statute.”
In this administration, of course, that seems like wishful thinking. For now, Bondi is busy investigating who’s been vandalizing Tesla dealerships across the country. “If you’re going to touch a Tesla, go to a dealership, do anything,” she said on Fox Business Network last week, “you better watch out because we’re coming after you.”
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