Citizens Against Gov't Waste Urges Consolidating 133 Federal Broadband Programs

and Vivek Ramaswamy met with a range of GOP lawmakers on Capitol Hill Thursday as they continued eyeing how to trim up to $2 trillion in federal spending. In late November, Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, urged Musk and Ramaswamy to recommend that lawmakers “pull the plug” on the $42.5 billion NTIA-led BEAD program (see 2412030050). Continued existence of “133 broadband programs across 15 agencies is clearly excessive and wasteful,” Deborah Collier, CAGW vice president-policy and government affairs, said in a blog post. “It is time for these programs to be scrutinized, so taxpayers are no longer forced to pay for those that are inefficient and ineffective and support the few that will not only work as intended but also deploy broadband to every remaining unserved and underserved business and household across the country that wishes to be connected to the internet.” Ernst urged that DOGE and Congress assess each broadband program “by determining if it is operating as intended; if it duplicates or overlaps with another program or another agency; if the program’s administrators are requiring the money to be spent to achieve goals that are outside of the statute establishing the program; if the program’s goals are still current in today’s market; whether the program’s objectives can be achieved by the private sector; and if it can be consolidated with a better managed program in another agency.”