The LA housing bureaucracy story was foreshadowed by another news item from June 2024 which didn’t make a big splash in the MSM because it made the Biden Administration look bad.

But it was significant all the same. In November 2021 Biden signed into law the trillion dollar Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and it had a section that would plough $42 billion into a national program to invest in rural broadband. As of June 2024 it had produced no rural broadband connections.

Now, a Democrat journalist/activist named Ezra Klein, has explained how this happened, and he did so to uber Lefty Democrat supporter and entertainer, Jon Stewart, whose reactions in the video below are priceless.

But first here’s the bullet point summary of the 14-step process required for various jurisdictions around the country who want to build these connections. There were fifty six applicants at the start of the process.

  1. Issue the notice funding opportunity with 180 days for responses.
  2. Submit a letter of intent.
  3. Submit a request for up to $5 million in planning grants.
  4. The requests are reviewed, approved and awarded by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA).
  5. Submit a five year action plan.
  6. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) must then publish the broadband data maps – where it thinks rural broadband subsidies are – before NTIA allocates funds.
  7. The states need an opportunity to challenge the maps for accuracy.
  8. Submit an initial proposal to the NTIA.
  9. NTIA must review and approve each state’s initial proposal.
  10. States must publish their own map and allow internal challenges to it.
  11. The NTIA must review and approve the challenge results and the final map.
  12. A competitive sub-granting process. must then be conducted.
  13. A final proposal is then submitted.
  14. The NTIA must review and approve the state’s final proposal.

According to Klein by the time they got to the last step they had three of the original 56 jurisdictions.

The real kicker is that all of this was not imposed on the Biden plan by existing bureaucracies and planning requirements but was written into the Act itself by its Democrat supporters.

So the next time an old-fashioned Lefty tells you about how the State needs to get involved in fixing up a market failure, typically where private enterprise won’t step in, regale them with this story. The massive building efforts of FDR’s New Deal (and here in NZ those of the First Labour government) are no longer possible precisely because of the rules and regulations written by the modern Left themselves.

Heh:

Before the decade is out Klein and Yglesias will be functionally early-2000s Republicans. Which is what they spent their careers fighting.