When Americans argue about infrastructure, the debate is usually how much to spend, who should pay, what ought to be built. The debates largely ignore how to protect infrastructure once it exists. That missed opportunity has a cost, and right now, millions of Americans are paying it in the form of severed broadband lines, disabled 911 centers, and communications outages that cascade through hospitals, schools, and emergency services in ways the original crime never intended but consistently produces.
The crisis is very real, well documented, and rapidly accelerating. New data from the fourth Telecom Industry Summit on Protecting Critical Communications Infrastructureshows over 18,000 incidents struck America’s communications networks in 2025. Service for nearly 12 million customersdisrupted daily and a 59 percent increase over 2024. While California and Texas account for more than half of all reported incidents, the damage spans the country.
The theft does follow an old and familiar economic logic.Copper is valuable, scrap metal dealers buy it, and for the most part the penalties for stealing it from a communications network are trivial.
Investigators describe brazen attacks in broad daylight: manholes pried open on city streets, heavy equipment brought to utility sites to strip entire cable runs. This is not opportunistic petty crime. The crime is organized andsystematic.
What makes it particularly pernicious is the huge negative externality, that is the yawning gap between what the thief gains and what everyone else loses. The copper extracted from a buried conduit might bring a few hundred dollars at a scrap yard. The fiber severed in the process might cost tens of thousands to repair. The 911 service interrupted might delay an ambulance by minutes that, in the wrong emergency, are the difference between life and death.
Economist Edward Lopez, Ph.D., has modeled these cascading costs: in 2025 alone, infrastructure theft and vandalism imposed societal costs of between $294 million and $1.47 billion.
As Pigou began and Gary Becker later explained, when negative externalities exist, the market systematically underproduces deterrence because the people harmed arenot the ones setting the penalties. That’s the economic justification for government intervention which in this case isstronger criminal penalties and scrap metal regulations that internalize the true cost of the crime back onto the people committing it.
But sadly, the policy gap is as equally stark as the economic chasm. Federal law provides up to ten years imprisonment for damaging communications infrastructure owned by the federal government. Vandalize privately-owned broadband network serving a community hospital or a county 911 system, and in most states, penalties are set by the resale value of the copper taken, not the communications value of what was destroyed.
Private networks are treated as commercial property in a dispute rather than essential infrastructure in a crisis. If that distinction ever made sense, it does not today.
States are beginning to respond. In 2025, 23 states considered new protections for communications infrastructure and 13 enacted strengthening laws, and in 2026, Colorado, Connecticut, Oregon, and Virginia adopted felony-level protections — bringing the total to 28 states that now classify such crimes as felonies. This momentum is welcome, but uneven protection is not the same as national protection.
The bipartisan Stopping the Theft and Destruction of Broadband Act (H.R. 2784) would close the most critical federal gap by explicitly criminalizing willful damage to privately owned communications infrastructure. If congress acts, then the states must enact parallel statutes and strengthen scrap metal regulations by banning cash purchases for restricted metals, requiring seller identification, and mandating transaction records that give law enforcement the tools to build cases.
The infrastructure that carries America’s broadband, its 911 calls, its wireless signals is under coordinated, escalating attack. The criminals have correctly calculated that the expected cost of the crime is low. Lawmakers at every level have the power and the responsibility to make that calculation wrong. The tools are available. The evidence is overwhelming. The only thing missing is urgency.
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