West Virginians have struggled for years with slow, spotty and unreliable internet. Between its topography and rural infrastructure, the state has struggled to connect homes and businesses to high-speed internet.
But in 2023, the state was allocated $1.2 billion in federal dollars through the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment program. The program promised to finally bring affordable, fast internet to rural communities.
And nearly three years later, no home has been connected through those dollars.
In an interview, Evan Feinman, who led the program during the Biden administration, reflects on how West Virginia’s plan is unfolding under Gov. Morrisey and the Trump administration.
He talks about what went right and what went wrong at the federal level, the role politics are playing and what it will take to get every household connected.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
MSS: What was the original goal of the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment (BEAD) program? Who was it designed for?
Evan Feinman: The goal of the program, originally and today, is to ensure that every single American has access to an affordable, reliable, high-speed internet connection. That was not always the case and remains not the case today.
The closest analog is rural electrification. That didn’t mean we were going to buy folks light bulbs or pay their electric bills for them, but it did mean we’d get a power line to their house.
And so the same idea existed in the BEAD program.
There was a set of locations, many millions, that still didn’t have the physical means of getting information from a device in your house out to the internet, and then information back from the internet to your house.
BEAD was designed to solve that problem.
MSS: It’s been over three years since the BEAD program was signed into law. Why are West Virginians still waiting for high-speed internet?
Feinman: First, just fundamentally, this is hard to do.
The Rural Electrification Act was passed in 1939, and 10 years later, they were not halfway done. Rural Electrification did not declare victory until the 1970s.
The second reason is that it is very challenging to get it right.
Imagine there is a single county in West Virginia, and in that county, there are 100 houses that need to be connected to the internet: 50 of them in a town, and then the other 50 scattered around up a holler, down a river valley, wherever.
And let’s say it would cost 100 bucks to connect everybody in the county.
An internet service provider would be very happy to come to you and say, “If you give me 30 bucks, I’ll connect those 50 houses in the town.”
And if you don’t think about it too long, that seems like a really good deal, because doing the whole county costs you a buck a house, but you can get 50 houses for 30 bucks.
The problem is, it still costs 70 bucks to hook up the other 50 houses, and so now you’ve really screwed up the economics of a standalone project.
And so what was really important was that we not keep cherry-picking the individual spots that were the cheapest to get to, and make it a steeper and steeper hill to climb to universal coverage.
MSS: Why have Republicans and the Trump administration criticized this internet expansion program?
Feinman: Two reasons. The first and primary reason is just bad faith politics. It was an election year, and so they wanted to criticize things. A ton of what they said is just objectively not right in really clear, verifiable ways. But then, second, they didn’t like what the law said.
We tried to get people the best connections we could, on budget and on time.
They later criticized the slowness of the program’s rollout, and I think that was also pretty disingenuous. The things that slowed the program down that weren’t particularly helpful were not the things they chose to focus on. There were never any labor requirements, there were no union requirements and there were no climate requirements.
We did use the word climate, but it had nothing to do with climate change. It was about the weather. If you’re building in Florida, we don’t want to put a whole network on telephone poles and have a hurricane blow in and knock it all down, and have to rebuild the damn thing.
Instead, we said, we want to see that you’re being smart about when you bury stuff and when you don’t, and that you’ve taken into account wildfires in the West and icy weather in the North.
And that seems very reasonable and sensible, and being good stewards of taxpayer dollars.
MSS: What have they changed?
Feinman: They didn’t agree whether it was worth spending a lot of money to get somebody a $50-a-month fiber connection that would get 1000 megabits download and 1000 megabits upload speeds.
They thought it was worth just giving that person a coupon for Starlink, which is going to cost them $120 a month and be significantly slower. Some 85% of Starlink customers today don’t actually get broadband speeds. That’s not going to get faster as more people get on that network.
Again, that’s not to criticize Starlink. It’s a neat technology for what it does. They’ve broken a lot of ground, and they’ll continue to improve, but it is not as good as a fiber connection.
I don’t think anybody credible would argue that it is.
And there’s another really important change, which is that the Trump administration moved the goal posts, which is a much easier way to win a race than to run the whole distance.
The original West Virginia final proposal was going to get more than 110,000 locations a fiber connection. The new final proposal is going to get 73,000 locations a connection.
MSS: Once West Virginia receives its $1.2 billion, when can we expect to see the first home connected? And how long could it take?
Feinman: We don’t know when West Virginia’s proposal will be approved. If they had not made any changes to the program, people would have started building projects in West Virginia in the spring of this year.
And how long it takes individual people to get connected as a result of those projects really varies in a lot of different ways. There’s no one project, which is one of the reasons it’s so complicated. There’s no cookie-cutter that you can drop. Every single network build is custom.
Before 2030, most West Virginians who don’t have access to the internet will get it.
MSS: Looking ahead, what’s your biggest concern or hope for how West Virginia handles this historic investment?
Feinman: I hope that everything gets built. And I think there’s really good evidence that it’ll happen.
A big difference between the BEAD program and other programs is that folks don’t get money until they’ve actually built the thing. They don’t just get the money and then build later.
But because the goalposts moved and the program changed, West Virginia is now only spending $600 million of its $1.2 billion allocation. Under the law, the other $600 million is West Virginia’s to spend on a variety of enumerated things, as well as anything else that gets the approval of the Assistant Secretary of Commerce.
That $600 million belongs to West Virginians, and it is a non-trivial amount of money.
But I’m very concerned that the reason the program was changed was so that this administration could claw that money back and declare victory by having not solved the problem, so they can fund other priorities.
West Virginians should fight like hell against that if it happens. There is an awful lot of really good work that can be done with those funds.