Connecting the Swamp: How Arielle Roth Exposed DC’s BEAD Fraud

By James Erwin

It is rare to see great shoe-leather investigative reporting these days. It is all the rarer for that reporting to come from a government official who should the one the press is holding accountable.

In an op-ed published by the Wall Street Journal this week, NTIA Administrator Arielle Roth chronicled her afternoon drive around Washington, DC to inspect BEAD locations. After exercising this minimal oversight, she saved taxpayers $4 million.

The Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program provides subsidies to states, territories, and the District of Columbia to connect unserved, rural areas. DC does not have any rural areas, so its eligibility for the program was always something of a boondoggle. In 2023, while Roth worked for then-Ranking Member Ted Cruz on the Senate Commerce Committee, the committee’s minority staff published a report that found many of DC “unserved locations,” for which the local government was applying for taxpayer subsidies, were in the National Zoo. It was the only place in DC they could plausibly claim to be unserved by high-speed internet.

Under President Biden, this fraud continued unabated and unquestioned by the media. Investigative reporters, who are supposed to challenge the government and question the establishment, should have dug deeper into a city’s application for rural broadband funding in the wake of this report.

Instead, Roth did the media’s job for them by taking an afternoon to inspect the locations that the DC government claimed were unserved. We have covered how Roth’s leadership has resulted in the BEAD program coming in 50% under budget – only about $20 billion of the $42.5 billion authorized for the program will be necessary to connect all of the unserved areas of America under the new, market-driven rules Roth adopted.

But that was just the beginning. New rules improved competition between applicants and discarded the Biden NTIA’s price-control regime, but did not scrutinize potentially fraudulent applications. Roth’s recent field work came about after DC claimed to need $4 million to connected 55 unserved locations, a cost of $70,000 per location in one of the most broadband-dense cities in America. When pressed to explain why it was so expensive, DC came back with a much lower price of $6,000 per location, a 90% reduction in cost.

This was of course even more suspicious, so Administrator Roth spent two hours visiting several of the locations with her team. The sites that supposedly needed a taxpayer-funded broadband connection included:

A shed along the railroad tracks;

A facility belonging to the local electric utility;

The field house of Catholic University;

And a temporary construction trailer.

When challenged on these locations, the DC local government acknowledged that none of those locations required federal funds. NTIA subsequently rejected DC’s BEAD application wholesale. The price tag of DC’s BEAD program dropped from $4 million to $0 in two hours thanks to basic scrutiny by a government official interested in protecting taxpayers. Her op-ed documenting all of this put the media to shame for failing to cover this blatant corruption.

Considering how brazen DC’s attempted theft of taxpayer money was, perhaps further such site visits are in order.