You say this, but if the US actually expanded nationwide fiber like we were supposed to there would have been a whole lot of ditches to dig up and refill. Public works projects don’t have to be wasteful.

You may know this already, but we did lay the fiber already like we were supposed to have. Most of it just never got used until ~20 years later. Because corporations need to milk their profits.

About 100 years ago, American capitalists drunk-drove the US economy into a ditch and the government had to jump-start it by allocating capital itself. The jobs were in national parks, schools, housing, and rural electrification. If you've ever been to a national park, chances are decent you walked by/over a plaque or stamp commemorating it.

It's reasonable to want most capital allocation to happen privately, thereby ensuring these decisions are made by people with a track record of success and skin-in-the-game. That's capitalism, it's good, and I'm a capitalist too. But the propaganda that the government is so inherently bad at this game that one should fight it even in an emergency is reductive, defeatist, and ahistorical.