SpaceX has sent a long letter of objection regarding Virginia’s Broadband, Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) Program Final Proposal to the state’s Department of Housing and Community Development (DHCD).
The key objection is that the DHCD did not adequately shift focus between the Biden and Trump administrations. The context, of course, is that Elon Musk, who was a controversial part of the new administration, is SpaceX’s chairman, CEO, and CTO.
“The Commonwealth of Virginia’s Broadband, Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program Final Proposal represents a massive waste of federal taxpayer money, reverting to the Biden Administration’s failed approach to BEAD and completely disregarding the Trump Administration’s effort to restructure the program to accelerate broadband deployment and reduce spending,” the SpaceX letter says.
“Simply put, Virginia has put its heavy thumb on the scale in favor of expensive, slow-to-build fiber bias over speedy, low cost, and technology neutral competition.”
The Virginia DHCD did not respond to a request for comment.
The SpaceX BEAD letter — the SCRIBD’s version of which does not carry a signature — includes a long list of complaints with the Final Proposal. Near the beginning, the letter suggests that the company was “excluded…from competing on equal footing with other providers for more than 95% [sic] households in the program based on third-party analysis championed by SpaceX’s competitors.”
The bulk of the document points to what SpaceX considers “grossly wasteful spending,” lack of a competitive process, “contrived explanations” of SpaceX’s capabilities, use of “unpublished and inaccurate evaluation criteria,” and payment of “mere lip service” to statutory and regulatory requirements.
The SpaceX letter concludes that the Virginia BEAD Final Proposal “must be revised to comply with the legal requirements of the program or be rejected.”
Earlier this month, the DHCD said that its BEAD plan is to make broadband available to 133,742 locations. A total of $613.3 million will be awarded, assuming NTIA approves the recommendations.
More information about Virginia broadband, including links to state funding resources, awards made, BEAD news, state-specific Telecompetitor coverage, and more can be found on Telecompetitor’s Broadband Nation webpage for the state.
