Congress, FCC Are Massively Screwing Up Their Supposedly Urgent Plan To ‘Rip Out And Replace’ Chinese Telecom Gear
The FCC, under both Trump and Biden, has made a huge, noisy deal about forcing U.S. telecoms to rip out Chinese telecom gear from U.S. networks, under the argument that the gear is used to spy on Americans (you’re to ignore, of course, that the United States spies on everyone, constantly, and has broadly supported backdooring all manner of sensitive telecom products globally).
The problem: after several years of politicians and regulators making a ton of noise about this pressing problem, they just… forgot to pay for it or make the program truly work. And while big carriers can temporarily afford to eat the added costs of ripping out network gear and replacing it with (usually way more expensive alternatives), smaller telecom operators don’t have that luxury.
As part of Congress’ and the FCC’s supposedly urgent plan to secure U.S. telecom networks, the FCC was doled out around $1.9 billion to fund a “Secure and Trusted Communications Networks Reimbursement Program” (aka “rip and replace). It’s widely believed it will cost $3 billion or so more to actually fix the job, but Congress has yet to authorize more.
But there’s another problem: understaffed and underfunded regulator (usually by industry design) that have been bogged down in reimbursement requests. According to a recent missive from the Rural Wireless Association, the FCC has only approved $190 million of its $1.9 billion budget, and its reimbursement approval process is a glacial mess:
roughly 40 percent of recipients are struggling with the lack of funding, an increase from 31 percent, as of January 2023. RWA expects this percentage to rise as this Program continues to go underfunded. In addition, after one year, the FCC has only approved approximately $190 million of the $1.895 billion budget, equaling approximately 10 percent of the overall underfunded amount currently available. Six months ago, the FCC had only approved about $41 million in reimbursement claims.
Again the budgetary shortfall and sluggish bureaucracy here is a particular problem for smaller companies, who were told to patriotically rip Chinese gear out of their networks (on some pretty spurious claims that it was all being used to spy on Americans, if we’re being honest) then replace it with significantly more expensive equipment. All told, the stumbles here will very likely harm another purported FCC priority: expanding broadband access into rural markets.
It’s yet another example of where policymakers will hyperventilate over China, and then just trip over their own ass when it comes time to implement genuinely productive efforts they claimed were a priority. In part because freaking out about China agitates the base, gets you on TV, and scores easy political points, but actually fixing the problem requires the kind of hard work that doesn’t get the same attention.
As a result, you’ll see guys like FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr go on TV to performatively hyperventilate about how TikTok (a company he doesn’t even regulate) is a major security threat, while the industry his agency is actually responsible for struggles to accomplish the very thing he routinely cites as a policy priority.
You’ll also see politicians singularly freak out about TikTok, but fail to regulate data brokers (who are selling access to most of the same data to Chinese intelligence). Or you’ll see politicians freak out about Huawei as a surveillance threat, but ignore that the vast, vast majority of cheap U.S. consumer gear (from home routers to “internet of things” devices) was also made it China.
So much of the hysteria around China is performative gibberish either designed to drum up cash for U.S. competitors who simply don’t want to compete with cheaper Chinese competitors, or to agitate a xenophobic base for partisan gain. Actually fixing security and national security issues requires the kind of steady focus and dedication our superficial attention economy doesn’t reward, so here we are.