The plan’s lead architect, Evan Feinman, says that before he was forced out by the Trump administration in March, [...] In March, Lutnick announced a “rigorous review” of BEAD, which he claims is too “woke” and filled with “burdensome regulations.” Now the plan may change.

Hatred really does make you do stupid things.

This would be REALLY CORRUPT if the CEO of Starlink was ALSO cutting HUNDREDS of THOUSANDS of American Jobs and SLASHING BILLIONS in Social Funding (like Social Security) just so we could Give Him these CONTRACTS! But FOX NEWS told me that was NOT true so it's OK!

Oh, I see.

You think this is a "politicians don't understand the tech they're supposed to regulate" issue, and not a "Elon Musk is bribing every greedy asshole in Congress to prop up his businesses at taxpayer expense" issue.

I think one of the issues with taking bribes is that even corrupt people don't want to completely ruin the economy because you don't want the people trying to bribe you lack the money to do so. Or in other words, even apart from any moral issues you don't want to kill your golden goose.

you underestimate how shortsighted republicans are

They can ruin the economy all they want. The people who are bribing them aren't going to run out of money.

Maybe not the top 5 out of those people but the rest certainly will.

What does it matter, the rest didn't bribe them anyway...

They won't. Not even the top 100. Politicians are relatively cheap to buy.

Uhhh – the politicians politicized money to companies to make tubes that we never got. Not sure if elaborating on details of tubes is going to help clear things up.

Ah yes, who needs fiber when you have an inferior product that will be worse in every calculable way?

Pay no attention to the person who stands to benefit from this deal. There’s definitely nothing illegal about it.

So what if the owner of Starlink just happened to spend a quarter of a billion dollars to get the current president elected? That surely has nothing to do with the abysmal Starlink service stealing away funding for critical infrastructure.

They were never building that, let's be honest.

Edit: rural broadband is like the new affordable housing, high speed rail, or better public transit... It's something that's completely possible to do but they'll always find some excuse to do nothing so they can campaign on it again next cycle

But just think how blazing fast the speeds will be! When they're hurtling out of orbit and crashing into your house!

If your nationwide fibre internet plan rollout was even half as bungled and bullshit as ours here in Australia, it must be a shitshow. It was used as a political pawn, with one party wanting to NOT finish it so they could use it to help get them re-elected endlessly, and the other party opposing it because it wasn't their idea, and pushing an alternative terrible plan that was far slower and far more expensive in the long term. In the end we got a terrible mix of both.

Why would they fall out of orbit?

This is proof of why Direct Democracy is better than "Representative" "Democracy"

I think it's mostly because they're told to.

Every single time the land line ISPs have gotten money for rural broadband, they use it for something else and don't build anything. Starlink actually built a network that works. Many places have gotten decent 5G home internet too.

I have been promised fiber for over a decade yet the only wired connection available is a DSL network that's been so poorly maintained that it barely even functions.

It was basically up to the states this time around, they could allocate BEAD funds more or less as they wanted and absolutely build fiber out to the vast majority of residences (look at North Dakota, it's evidently possible) through models like municipal fiber.

Ultimately it's a political issue more than anything else, Americans just can't get anything done anymore, politicians would rather enrich themselves and voters only care about the culture war.

Counterpoint: the fact that the moral "don't kill the goose that lays the golden eggs" even exists is proof that people are indeed greedy and/or stupid enough to do that very thing.