A Staredown Between States and NTIA Over the Future of ‘Non-Deployment’ Funding
State broadband offices worry they’ll get the short end of the pencils they are sharpening.
DENVER, August 7, 2025 - State broadband offices are stuck in a staring contest with the National Telecommunications and Information Administration.
State officials, speaking at the Mountain Connect conference here this week, said they can’t plan for the future of the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment program without knowing whether they will be getting the additional monies promised their states.
For its part, according to an official from the Commerce Department agency speaking at the same conference, the NTIA can’t plan for BEAD “non-deployment” funds until it knows how much the states will actually be spending on broadband deployment.
The staredown is over leftover “non-deployment” funds, which are separate from payments to ISPs for last-mile broadband. These funds could theoretically cover everything from workforce training to connections for community anchor institutions to hardening infrastructure.
But the staredown is making both sides frustrated about the future.
Further guidance from NTIA hasn’t come, may not come soon
When the NTIA rewrote the rules for BEAD funding in its June 6 restructure, it put all “non-deployment” activities on hold, but promised to issue further guidance later.
The NTIA’s pause has been sparking concern that the NTIA might try to claw back these funds.
In a Wednesday blog post, consultant Doug Dawson said his informal poll of policy experts revealed a split between those who believed the agency would kill non-deployment funding and those optimistic that the NTIA had ”left the door open and didn’t kill the funding when they issued the Notice of the new rules.”
In remarks on Tuesday, NTIA Chief of Staff Brooke Donilon affirmed that the Trump administration would follow the law’s funding requirements. But she also declined to rule out canceling non-deployment funds.
“We’re just following the law. This is a deployment program. It’s not a non-deployment program,” Donilon said. “We’re going to deliver on the benefit of the bargain, and we will figure out how much we have for non-deployment. Until we know how much money we’re talking [about], it’s hard to talk about the policy.”
Her remarks seemed to suggest that additional guidance on non-deployment funds won’t be coming anytime soon.
“It’s something we should think about,” Donilon said. But with the goal to get deployment funding out the door this year, “We have to focus on that right now.”
When Broadband Breakfast asked Stephen Yusko, deputy director of NTIA’s Office of Public Affairs, on Wednesday whether the agency had any updated guidance regarding non-deployment funds, he said it did not.
States deeply concerned about cutting their own budgets
Regardless of what the NTIA decides, it's clear that the agency’s pause on non-deployment projects has left many state broadband officials in the dark and uncertain.
“Do we have a non-deployment plan?” Peter Voderberg, chief of BroadbandOhio at the Ohio Department of Development, asked rhetorically. “Yes. We had $50 million in workforce that the NTIA has already taken away from me. It’s gone. All of the people who are working on the industry-sector partnership in the state of Ohio for workforce have been fired,” he emphasized, raising his voice.
“They’re gone. All of them. At all universities, at the Ohio State University, and WIA, which was our industry-sector intermediary, all of them are no longer working for the state of Ohio.”
“Even if I get that $50 million back, I’ve got to start over to try to reinvigorate my industry-sector partnership that I had to shut down,” Voderberg said, once again raising his voice. “So do I have faith that we’re going to have non-deployment dollars? No.”
Voderberg made it clear that he was not looking forward to telling residents of his state about potentially rescinded funding.
“Now it’s like, ‘Hey, be as cheap as possible,’” Voderberg said. “So all of us states went, ‘Okay, we’ll be as cheap as possible, and that means we’ll have non-deployment dollars.’ And then they’re like, ‘Oh, no, no, we’re going to take all the non-deployment dollars back.’ You’ve forced me to make it cheap, so now I have to go to all my Appalachian regions and say, ‘Guess what? You’ve got the cheapest thing I could possibly get for you. Aren’t you happy?’”
Voderberg may have been the most vocal skeptic, but he wasn’t the only one. Bree Maki, executive director of Minnesota’s Broadband Office, said she had been told she wasn’t receiving any non-deployment dollars.
“At this point we’ve been told ‘you don’t get to use your non-deployment [dollars],’” Maki said, sounding defeated. We have been told that there is no non-deployment available, unless you’re really creative on how you language that in your final proposal.”
Though Eric Frederick, chief connectivity officer for Michigan’s High-Speed Internet Office, didn’t completely disagree with Maki, he did note that the use of non-deployment dollars was part of the BEAD statute.
“I’m going to propose uses for it because statute says that I can. And I think we should,” Frederick said.
No mention of non-deployment in Virginia’s final proposal
Some broadband offices may have given up trying to secure non-deployment funding. Virginia’s Broadband Office, which had previously planned to use non-deployment funds for more cell towers and other initiatives, released its final BEAD proposal Thursday. Though the proposal came $868 million under budget, it did not mention non-deployment projects.
Other state broadband officials seemed to have adopted a wait-and-see mindset. Thomas Tyler, deputy director at ConnectLA, said that “We’ll see where we end up post-September 4.”
Brian Mitchell, director of Nevada’s Governor’s Office of Science, Innovation and Technology, expressed a similar sentiment, stating that “we’re kind of focused on getting the deployment right and making sure that we’re about to submit our new final proposal by September 4.”
Glen Howie, director of Arkansas’s broadband office, called the non-deployment question “the thousand-dollar question: There’s so many variables to that. What do the feds want to do? We don’t know.”
When told by an audience member that the BEAD statute allowed for the use of non-deployment dollars, and that states should tell the NTIA that they intend to use their non-deployment dollars, Howie seemed open to the idea.
“I hear you on that,” Howie said. “Arkansas hears you.”
Speaking on another panel, Tyler’s boss Veneeth Iyengar, executive director at ConnectLA, did sound an optimistic note on the subject.
“Our allocation was $1.35 billion, which meant we were going to have over half a billion dollars in non-deployment funds,” said Iyengar. “Those were our results before. We’re going to have even more efficient results, which means potentially we might have more funds available for non-deployment.”
Correction: Because of an editing error, Brooke Donilon's name was misspelled in a prior version of this article. The spelling has been corrected.
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