By Lawson Faulkner
While Hurricane Milton rips through the midsection of Florida, communities throughout western North Carolina are only beginning to reckon with the devastation wrought by Hurricane Helene. Luckily, while rural Appalachia begins to put its pieces back together, Starlink, a satellite technology company owned by Elon Musk, has offered to provide internet and cellular services to fill the vacuum left by debilitated telecommunications infrastructure.
Over the past weeks, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and various private organizations have leveraged Starklink terminals to provide critical recovery services, saving countless lives in remote areas of western North Carolina. But this is a 180° swerve from the administration’s previous hostile stance towards Starlink.
Due to the White House’s long-standing vendetta against Musk, Starlink technology that could have been provided to these struggling rural communities nearly four years ago is now being hastily deployed in a time of crisis. Time and again, the Biden-Harris administration has chosen to prioritize its ideological grudges over critical actions aimed at closing the digital divide. While the White House has subjected Musk to an avalanche of regulatory harassment, countless communities have been robbed of the opportunity to access affordable satellite internet. Now, in the midst of Hurricane Helene’s destruction, the true cost of the Biden-Harris administration playing politics is visible for all eyes to see.
In 2020, the FCC secured an $885 million contract with Starlink to provide internet access for over 640,000 homes in 35 states at a cost of roughly $1300 per location. This agreement would have covered 17 of the 21 North Carolina counties hit hardest by Hurricane Helene. Unfortunately, the deal was nixed by the Democrat-controlled FCC in late 2023under the pretense that Starlink was not providing high-speed internet service on an adequate deployment timeline. However, many critics have suspected a partisan bias within the FCC’s final decision. As Commissioner Brendan Carr explained in his dissent to the deal’s annulment, “after Elon Musk acquired Twitter and used it to voice his own political and ideological views without a filter, President Biden gave federal agencies a greenlight to go after him.”
Following Musk’s vocal criticism of the Biden-Harris administration, numerous executive agencies including the DOJ, FAA, FTC, and the NLRB have opened investigations into his business affairs.
Commissioner Carr has argued that the FCC has held Starlink to a standard that it “made up on the fly.” While Starlink has been the first and only company subjected to this deployment requirement, Carr noted that “if the FCC were to apply this novel Starlink speed test standard to any of the other 2020 awardees, it would show that those entities are not reasonably capable of meeting their 2025 obligations either.” If no company could follow such a rigorous timeline, then why was Starlink solely subjected to this unachievable standard? Could it be that the FCC, at the direction of a begrudged White House, concocted a cheap excuse to strip Musk of an otherwise sound contract?
The FCC has yet to provide an alternative solution for closing the digital divide within these rural communities. While the initial Starlink contract totaled $885 million, the construction of traditional high-speed fiber lines would cost the federal government around $3 billion. As Commissioner Carr concluded, the annulment “certainly fits the Biden Administration’s pattern of regulatory harassment”, adding that it was a “decision that cannot be explained by any objective application of law, facts, or policy.”
Whether or not the FCC works with a private sector partner should have nothing to do with the owner’s politics. Regardless of the opinions of their critics, government officials have an obligation to keep the needs of everyday Americans at the forefront of their leadership agenda. Rather than picking winners and losers based upon ideological vendettas, the Biden-Harris administration should check its ego at the door for future broadband deployment projects. While rural Appalachia suffers from the devastation of Hurricane Helene and central Florida braces for a similar crisis, private corporations are rectifying the failures of the White House. To mitigate future catastrophes, the Biden-Harris administration needs to shed its partisan hubris.
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