House Science's Lucas Supports Putting Broadband in Infrastructure Legislation
House Science Committee ranking member Frank Lucas, R-Okla., would support including broadband in a broader infrastructure measure, he said during an appearance on C-SPAN’s The Communicators to have been televised this weekend. “Broadband is one of the great equalizers of…
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our society,” he said. “It’s important that we help encourage equalization” of access because a continued lack of it will result in the "continued brain drain of rural America." Broadband "is to us what the pencil and the tablet was to my great-grandparents 100 years ago," Lucas said. House Democrats recently unveiled their Moving Forward Act infrastructure legislative package (HR-2), which includes $100 billion in broadband funding (see 2006220054). Lucas emphasized the need for any infrastructure package to prioritize funding for rural broadband projects. Many providers "who want to access" existing funding "tend to want to deploy" broadband "in the very fringes of the suburbs," Lucas said. "We have to continue to push out into the countryside."