In April, the Biden Administration released its plan for a massive (depending-on-how-you-count-it) $2.0 to $2.65 trillion capital expenditure on new infrastructure. Known as the American Jobs Plan, it is an ambitious program to update America’s interstate highways, ports, and public utilities—an investment that in my opinion is long overdue. Unfortunately this Plan also funds an even greater number of projects that have nothing to do with the traditional nuts-and-bolts physical infrastructure that over the past 150 years have led to massive leaps in American mobility and productivity.

Instead this plan earmarks money for creating new government agencies and programs, for picking winners and losers in our economy rather than letting a free market decide those choices, directly funds workforce development and training, and offers a variety of grants and low-interest loans to do what our nation’s financial institutions are already set-up to do. According to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, this legislation includes investments like offering rebates and incentives to purchase electric vehicles, provide funding for climate change research and development, protect against future pandemics through “medical countermeasures”, expand home- and community-based care services for the elderly, provide additional funding for domestic manufacturing, and numerous other “non-infrastructure projects” that crowd out investments in real infrastructure projects that truly make a difference.

One of those difference-making investments from a healthy home point-of-view, would be the creation of a new nationwide network of sustainable wired—NOT WIRELESS—broadband infrastructure. That investment would center around the build-out of a nation-wide network of fiberoptic cables which would be orders of magnitude faster than 5G while being much more secure without the associated electromagnetic fields that come with 5G transmission.

We have precedence for such a project—Longmont, CO and especially Chattanooga, TN offer the best examples of local municipalities that decided to install fiberoptic in their city and reaped tremendous benefits. In Chattanooga,

As Timothy Schoechle points out in his recent research treatise published by The National Institute for Science, Law & Public Policy:

“The Internet has become one of the defining technologies
of our society. It is our central medium for commerce and communication—but more importantly—for our public discourse, engagement, and democratic governance. However,
it has been hijacked by the commercial motivations that have come to re-define and constrain the availability, quality, content, and media of high-speed access in the United States.”