Trump Declares High-Speed Internet Program 'Racist' and 'Unconstitutional'

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/08/us/politics/trump-biden-digital-equity-act.html

Trump Declares High-Speed Internet Program ‘Racist’ and ‘Unconstitutional’
President Trump denounced the Biden-era Digital Equity Act as “woke handouts based on race,” raging in a social media post against a broad effort to improve high-speed internet access.
By Chris Cameron
May 8, 2025

President Trump on Thursday attacked a law signed by President Joseph R. Biden Jr. aimed at expanding high-speed internet access, calling the effort “racist” and “totally unconstitutional” and threatening to end it “immediately.”

Mr. Trump’s statement was one of the starkest examples yet of his slash-and-burn approach to dismantling the legacy of his immediate predecessor in this term in office. The Digital Equity Act, a little-known effort to improve high-speed internet access in communities with poor access, was tucked into the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill that Mr. Biden signed into law early in his presidency.

The act was written to help many different groups, including veterans, older people and disabled and rural communities. But Mr. Trump, using the incendiary language that has been a trademark of his political career, denounced the law on Thursday for also seeking to improve internet access for ethnic and racial minorities, raging in a social media post that it amounted to providing “woke handouts based on race.”

In reality, the law barely mentions race at all, only stating that racial minorities could be covered by the program while including a nondiscrimination clause that says that individuals could not be excluded from the program “on the basis of actual or perceived race, color, religion, national origin, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, or disability” — language taken from the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The Digital Equity Act, drafted by Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington, provides $60 million in grants to states and territories to help them come up with plans to make internet access more equal, as well as $2.5 billion in grants to help put those plans into effect. Some of that funding has already been disbursed to states with approved plans — including red, rural states like Indiana, Alabama, Arkansas, Iowa and Kansas. Hundreds of millions of dollars in additional funding were approved by the Biden administration in the weeks before Mr. Trump took office, but have not yet been distributed.

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Another projection, as usual