SADOW: Landry, Louisiana Score First with Trump Grant Reforms

While it was the Republican Gov. Jeff Landry Administration that won the footrace in rolling out high-speed internet access across Louisiana, the Republican President Donald Trump Administration deserves an assist.

Regarding the Broadband, Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program — intended to expand connectivity nationwide and stuffed into one of the many spending bills pushed through Congress by Trump’s Democratic predecessor — Louisiana announced in November that 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.”

Those reforms were key to the state’s rapid progress. The original program—whose purpose was already becoming stale given that roughly 99 percent of households had high-speed access by 2021—was saddled with Democratic-crafted stipulations that turned it into a politicized handout. The rules gave 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 (ending favoritism toward terrestrial providers), 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. Together, these changes 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. Under the previous rules, the most expensive project ran as high as $120,000 per connection; under the new framework, that figure dropped to $7,547. 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 accounted for only 1.64 percent of all grant money allocated.

Given the ball, the Landry Administration scored before all other states. Alignment with the philosophy behind the reforms clearly aided a rapid response, with Louisiana aiming to complete deployment by Feb. 2. The free-market, light-government approach embraced by Landry and Trump wins yet again.