Greg Sargent: Angry Trump Kills "Woke" Program--and Accidentally Screws MAGA Voters

[Dennis Donovan]

Greg Sargent - (archived: https://archive.ph/b8l73 ) Angry Trump Kills “Woke” Program—and Accidentally Screws MAGA Voters

It’s called the Digital Equity Act. That word—“equity”—caught the White House’s attention. So now Trump is moving to nix funding—but it could cut off millions destined for red America.

Greg Sargent
May 10, 2025

The other day, during his intensive daily reading of complex policy papers, President Donald Trump noticed that a government initiative created by his predecessor had the word “equity” in its title. Naturally, this caught his attention. As he appeared to conclude, this could only mean the initiative was designed to help undeserving minorities.

Which presented Trump with a ripe opportunity to demagogue about supposed reverse racism against white people. As Trump just announced on Truth Social, he has canceled the program, raging that it’s “RACIST.” He fumed: “No more woke handouts based on race!”

Except there’s a problem here. The program in question, the Digital Equity Act, contained huge amounts of money for governments in GOP-run states, as well as Democratic ones, to expand high-speed internet access in underserved communities—very much including red states’ rural areas.

What’s more, every red state government had submitted proposals designed to garner their states large amounts of this funding. These proposals were explicitly designed by these GOP governments partly to serve their states’ rural areas.

While much of that money has already been granted, large sums still have not, according to the office of Senator Patty Murray, who is monitoring these expenditures as ranking Democrat on the Appropriations Committee. With Trump moving to block these funds, these states now could be denied some or possibly all of that money, Murray’s office says.

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