Vice President Kamala Harris is shamelessly trying to run away from her ‘Border Czar’ responsibilities, often with the assistance of a compliant ‘news’ media, but that wasn’t the only major job with which she’s been tasked in the Biden-Harris administration. The president also tapped her to help lead and oversee a number of expensive ‘green’ and infrastructure initiatives. On a costly plan to install new electric vehicle chargers (Harris is suddenly pretending she has nothing to do with EV mandates she has supported and co-sponsored), Politico described its ‘progress’ in late 2023: “Congress at the urging of the Biden administration agreed in 2021 to spend $7.5 billion to build tens of thousands of electric vehicle chargers across the country, aiming to appease anxious drivers while tackling climate change. Two years later, the program has yet to install a single charger.” This past summer, the results were still embarrassing: “Just seven electric-vehicle charging stations have begun operating with funding from a $5-billion US government program created in 2021, marking “pathetic” progress, a Democratic senator said on Wednesday.”
That serves as a backdrop to a related matter on which Harris was explicitly placed in charge. FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr summarized the issue in a recent Wall Street Journal op/ed, explaining how a much-ballyhooed rural broadband project has utterly failed thus far, on Harris’ watch:
Kamala Harris lamented recently that “in America, it takes too long and it costs too much to build.” She’s right. But she failed to mention that those costly delays are a feature, not a bug, of her progressive policies. Consider Ms. Harris’s record. In 2021 she agreed to lead the administration’s $42 billion plan for expanding high-speed internet to millions of Americans. That year, shetweetedthat “we can bring broadband to rural America today.” Today, nearly three years after Congress passed the infrastructure bill that created the program, not one home or business has been connected through it. The Biden-Harris administration recently confirmed that construction projects won’t begin until next year at the earliest, and in many cases not until 2026.
Instead of focusing on delivering broadband to unserved areas, the administration has used the program to advance a wish list of political goals. It has adopted regulations that include diversity, equity and inclusion requirements, climate-change rules, price controls, preferences for union labor, and schemes that favor government-run networks. The administration has been handing out wins to favored political groups rather than delivering results. Other factors have kept Ms. Harris’s high-speed program in the slow lane. Testifying before a congressional oversight committee, one state government official described “a chaotic implementation environment” marked by “dysfunction” and “delays.” The administration, she said, “has provided either no guidance, guidance given too late, or guidance changing midstream.” […]
— Read More: townhall.com
