Sen. Ted Cruz Warns of Potential Waste in BEAD Allocations
The conservative critic of the broadband program highlighted inaccurate FCC mapping data in a report.
WASHINGTON, September 15, 2023 – Senate Commerce ranking member Ted Cruz, R-Texas, warned in a report on Friday of potential waste in Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment funds.
Part of the Infrastructure, Investment and Jobs Act, the program allocated over $42 billion for expanding broadband infrastructure in areas with poor internet access. That funding was awarded to states in June based on the number of those areas listed in the Federal Communication Commission’s National Broadband Map.
The 20-page report from Cruz’s office highlights how it believes the map is inaccurate, and claims that it disproportionately benefited states with fewer unserved areas – those with no meaningful internet access – than the map shows. It points to Washington, D.C., where the FCC’s map shows a third of the district’s unserved areas within the National Zoo, and notes the high allocation per unserved map location.
D.C. received fewer BEAD funds than any state – just over the minimum benchmark of $100 million set out in the program – but its small size and dense population gave it over $540,000 per location, opposed to the national median of $5,600.
The broadband map is also considered by some state broadband offices to be inaccurate. The commission has released an updated version since the allocation of BEAD funds based on challenges to its coverage data and is requiring states to accept local challenges before awarding any grants with BEAD funds.
Cruz also noted in the report that some areas slated to be served by other federal funding programs are marked as unserved in the FCC map. Funds under the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund, Capital Projects Fund, and ReConnect Program have been awarded for providers to build infrastructure in areas that are still currently unserved, meaning BEAD funds were allocated based in part on areas that will receive broadband anyway.
The report calculated 85,000 of the 3 million unserved areas slated to be served by BEAD will already have been given service by another federal program.
The report also criticized BEAD’s preference for fiber infrastructure, saying alternative means of providing internet like satellite and fixed wireless could serve hard-to-reach areas for less money.
