Borrowing from the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society of an Op-Ed from Ezra Klein in the New York Times…

I’ve been thinking about something that Jake Sullivan, President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, said in a post-election interview: “The president has been operating on a time horizon measured in decades, while the political cycle is measured in four years.” What we’re seeing now is that this was a false choice. There is no way to cleave the policy of the next decade from the outcome of the next election. If you lose power, your carefully constructed set of bills and international alliances can be turned to cinder by your successor. If it is true that President Biden believed he was choosing the politics of posterity over the policies Americans would feel before the election, then he chose wrong. But I don’t think it was a choice. Delay has become the default setting of American government. The 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act was supposed to pump hundreds of billions into roads, bridges, rural broadband, electric vehicle chargers. By 2024, few of its projects were finished or installed. That wasn’t because the Biden team wanted to run for re-election on the backs of news releases rather than ribbon cuttings. But the administration didn’t make the changes necessary to deliver on a time frame the public could feel. Many members of Biden’s staff now bitterly regret it. 

I’m not here to say this in an issue owned by one political party but to ask – how can an understanding of this perspective help with increasing broadband access and adoption quickly but in a way that meets the needs for a long time?