Trump administration changes to the $42.5 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) grant program are poised to introduce years of potential new delays to the already slow-moving program, potentially undermining the program’s goal of bringing universal broadband access to mostly rural communities.
Worse, the looming changes would eliminate efforts to ensure taxpayer-funded broadband is affordable for low-income Americans, while driving billions in new subsidies to the world’s richest man and Trump mega donor Elon Musk.
Testifying this week before a Senate Appropriations Committee, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick confirmed that the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) will “soon” issue a new Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) that states will have 90 days to respond to.
The revisions will ensure that billionaire Elon Musk – and his capacity-constrained satellite broadband network Starlink – will receive significantly more taxpayer money. Such Low-Earth orbit satellite networks were slated to get some funds, but federal changes may result in them dominating grant funding, overruling the mix of technology states had originally preferred.
Other changes being implemented include elimination of provisions ensuring affordable access for low-income Americans.
Lutnick insists that the NTIA will then approve state plans that are the most “efficient” and “cost-effective,” raising the specter that state plans that aren’t appropriately deferential to Starlink – or include approaches the Trump administration doesn’t approve of (like financing for community-owned broadband networks) – may face additional delays.
“What this probably means is that most states will have to re-write their grant proposals and rerun their grant programs from scratch, and then NTIA will have to approve them,” Gigi Sohn, the Director for the American Association for Public Broadband, said in a post to LinkedIn. “This makes disbursement in 7 months largely a fantasy.”
Lutnick insists that BEAD funding will still begin to flow to states by the end of the year, though new analysis by the Benton Institute For Broadband and Society, suggests the Republican changes could result in states having to significantly retool their compliance plans, resulting in up to two years in additional delays for billions in promised broadband investment established in the bipartisan infrastructure law.
“Mandated changes – if they come from either Congress or the U.S. Department of Commerce – could force states to rerun their entire BEAD sub-grantee selection processes,” Benton’s Reid Sharkey notes.
“The resulting delays will cost ISPs across the country hundreds of millions of dollars in time and resources to plan for the new program guidelines and reapply for awards.”
Sharkey uses the state of Illinois as an example of the significant new delays.
In his example, Illinois would be required to revise state broadband program administrative rules and gain approval from the Illinois General Assembly, a process that alone could take four to six months.
The state would then need to take at least a month to revise the BEAD-funded Connect Illinois Round 4 Notice of Funding Opportunity.
From there, Illinois state leaders would need to take at least nine months to rerun the state mapping challenge process to recalculate eligible locations. Followed by at least another six to nine month effort to revisit the subgrantee selection process.
“Repeating this process would mean duplicating costs associated with platform management, staff time, and external reviewers,” Benton notes. “Additionally, data request fatigue could lead to lower engagement from both communities and ISPs, making it harder to collect meaningful input.”
ILSR’s Christopher Mitchell recently spoke with Josh Etheridge, Chief Strategic Officer of EPC – a broadband construction company based in Louisiana – who notes the recent additional BEAD delays have disrupted local businesses, sidelined workers, and stalled broadband expansion in some of the country’s most disconnected communities.
Changes Would Largely Benefit Industry Giants, Elon Musk
The great irony is that many of the changes being proposed aren’t productive, don’t really benefit the broader public, and instead of streamlining the program, have resulted in both new delays and significantly worse overall outcomes.
Back in March, reports began to emerge that Republicans were eyeing significant changes to the BEAD program after leveraging the program’s slow-progress as an election season campaign issue. While the changes were portrayed as an effort to improve government efficiency, Sohn and others argued that most of the modifications were of direct benefit to entrenched broadband providers.
Among the proposed changes is the elimination of requirements mandating that Internet providers receiving federal funds offer at least one “low-cost broadband service option for eligible subscribers.”
Telecom giants have been fighting tooth and nail against any requirements that they try to make broadband affordable to low-income Americans, including recently asking the Trump administration to block state efforts to pass affordable broadband legislation.
Other changes eliminated fairly decorative climate and labor provisions affixed to deployments. Some additional modifications involve changing program language to ensure that billionaire Elon Musk – and his low-Earth-orbit (LEO) Starlink network – could potentially receive billions in additional subsidies.
That’s ruffled the feathers of some activists and broadband leaders, who have pointed out that the original BEAD language prioritized fiber for good reason.
Starlink may be an excellent solution for those with no other option or for isolated households where deploying fiber would be extremely costly, but the service is expensive, increasingly congested, harms scientific research, may erode the ozone layer, and is in no way ready to scale to meet the full need of the country’s unserved populations.
Money directed toward Starlink’s half solution is money redirected away from higher-capacity options with an eye on affordability, including many community-owned and operated municipal broadband networks, city-run utilities, and the nation’s many electrical cooperatives, which are busy levering decades old experience in rural electrification to bridge the digital divide.
“Stranding all or part of rural America with worse internet so that we can make the world’s richest man even richer is yet another in a long line of betrayals by Washington,” former BEAD director Evan Feinman said after leaving the agency back in March.
Feinman noted at the time that numerous states were just steps away from implementing their BEAD deployments when Congressional Republicans and the Trump administration began fiddling with the program to the benefit of Elon Musk.
New Delays Come After Widespread Republican Complaints About BEAD Delays
The new Republican delays are particularly ironic after Republicans spent much of last election season lamenting BEAD’s slow progress.
“Today, nearly three years after Congress passed the infrastructure bill that created the program, not one home or business has been connected through it,” Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr lamented in a Wall Street Journal editorial last November.
While BEAD will never be considered a poster child for government efficiency, many of the program’s delays were caused by justifiable reasons. Such as the need to completely remap broadband access on a county-by-county level after years of corruption-fueled failure to properly track and catalog U.S. broadband availability.
Many of the changes to BEAD – including shifting management from the FCC to the NTIA and individual states – were also well-intentioned efforts to avoid the fraud and scandal that had plagued earlier programs, including the FCC’s Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF).
That program, as ILSR has well documented, involved the first Trump administration rubber stamping numerous, problematic grant proposals by providers that wound up being incapable of following through on their planned deployments, resulting in millions of defaulted bids, massive delays, and a steady parade of legal challenges.
As a direct response to those failures, the infrastructure bill shifted oversight to the NTIA, and gave individual states a more direct role in determining how an historic wave of broadband grant funding would be spent. Oversight and independence some state leaders say is being steadily eroded by freshly-proposed Republican BEAD program changes.
There have certainly been areas of BEAD that could see improved efficiency.
Last year some ISPs in Minnesota bristled at requirements that equipment improved with taxpayer funds be held in trust by the NTIA. Others expressed concern about previous programs like RDOF boxing them out of BEAD funding opportunities. And some justifiably criticized restrictive letter of credit (LOC) requirements affixed to the grant process.
But the changes being proposed by Republican leadership address none of these real-world concerns. Instead, many of the proposed revisions prioritize industry giants over the public interest, introduce new and pointless delays, and only serve to further undermine long-percolating efforts to finally address the country’s long standing rural digital divide.
Header image of ‘Expect Delays’ sign courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons, Attribution 2.0 Generic
Inline image of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick testifying before Congress courtesy of Broadband Breakfast
Inline image of construction worker holding stop sign courtesy of Christian Collins on Flickr, Creative Commons, Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic
Inline image of Starlink satellite constellation courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons, Attribution 2.0 Generic
Inline image of FCC Chairman Brendan Carr courtesy of Gage Skidmore on Flickr, Creative Commons, Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic