Technology

The old saying “timing is everything” apparently also applies to corruption.

On June 6, mere hours after Elon Musk started his tweet war with the president, Trump’s Commerce Department released its long-awaited revisions to the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (“BEAD”) program.

This $42 billion broadband-deployment plan was part of the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (“IIJA”) that Congress passed in November 2021. As expected, the Trump administration’s revisions radically overhauled what had been a rural broadband-deployment plan focused on building fiber networks — and turned it into a free money dispenser for Elon Musk’s satellite-broadband company, Starlink.

Had this billionaire bromance fallen apart a few weeks earlier, we might have seen a less sweeping revision of this once-in-a-lifetime infrastructure program. But now that this revised plan is out there, analysts everywhere — operating on the premise that Trump-administration corruption is a given — are trying to predict how and to what degree the Trump team will enforce these changes designed to unjustly enrich Musk … a man the president reportedly called “a big time drug addict” as the two traded barbs.