Feds praise BEAD’s progress, but others aren’t convinced
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By
Chris Teale
The NTIA touted the program’s first-ever connections and said more is to follow. Some Democrats in Congress said the agency is being evasive about what happens to leftover funds.
To hear the federal government tell it, the effort to roll out broadband infrastructure in its massive $42 billion initiative is going swimmingly. Others, however, are not so sure.
The National Telecommunications and Information Administration announced in May that Nebraska had connected its first household under the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment program, making it one of the first BEAD-funded connections in the United States. At the time, Gov. Jim Pillen said in a statement it was a “tremendous victory for Nebraska.”
That connection came just under a year after NTIA and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick announced various changes to the program that was initially funded under the 2021 infrastructure law. In a speech to the Free State Foundation think tank in Washington, D.C., earlier this month, NTIA Administrator Arielle Roth called it a “really exciting stage,” as states are “finally moving into the deployment stage that we waited so long for.”
“The states are in the process of negotiating contracts with providers, getting them signed and finally seeing deployment happening, and we’re looking forward to much similar good news in the months ahead,” Roth continued.
Program changes announced last year, in what NTIA described as the “Benefit of the Bargain” round, included a removal of a preference for fiber in favor of technological neutrality, as well as limiting labor and employment requirements and obligations to review projects’ impact on the environment. The Government Accountability Office said in a ruling late last year that those changes were illegal as they had not been submitted to Congress for approval beforehand.
A lot of uncertainty remains around the fate of approximately $21 billion in savings the NTIA said it delivered under its tweaks to the BEAD program. The future of that money has been a continual source of debate, with various ideas floating around, including a reserve fund to use for a second round of bidding and to mitigate any provider defaults; cash to support network resilience; and another chunk to spend on digital literacy, among others.
So far, the only public statement from NTIA on that $21 billion came in early March, when Roth said in a statement the agency was “taking additional time to review the comments and finalize our approach to ensure these funds are spent as efficiently and responsibly as possible.”
She has not been drawn on the money’s future since that March announcement, and NTIA spokespeople did not respond to requests for comment. Roth has said, however, there is little time to waste in getting projects moving.
“Statutorily, there's a four-year deployment timeline,” she said at the Free State Foundation event. “We would love to see projects deployed as quickly as possible, and so certainly that's something that we're closely monitoring. Having an all-of-the-above technology solution is really critical to that expeditious deployment.”
Some lawmakers, however, have found the NTIA’s limited public statements on its leftover $21 billion unacceptable. In a letter to Lutnick and Roth sent last week, four Democratic members of Congress said they have yet to receive a response to questions they raised last year about those leftover funds, and said states “still lack the basic guidance needed to responsibly plan for and deploy a significant portion of their BEAD allocations.”
“Instead of communicating with states and answering Congress’ questions about how it is now evaluating and allocating these funds, DOC has unclearly touted $21 billion in claimed BEAD savings,” Rep. April McClain-Delaney, a Maryland Democrat and a signatory to the letter, said in an accompanying statement. “This raises concerns about whether those funds are purposefully not being utilized by this Administration or whether said funds have been diverted for other unauthorized purposes.”
The letter continued to say that Roth’s calling the money as “savings” is “disingenuous and misleading,” and added that NTIA must commit in writing to not try to return it to the Treasury Department, which would be illegal as the money has been appropriated. They criticized the agency for its lack of transparency.
“These dollars are lawfully available for nondeployment uses, and any true surplus is already directed by statute to other eligible recipients,” the members wrote. “These funds are state allocations — not discretionary federal reserves that may be repurposed or reclaimed.”