An Interview With Former BEAD Director Evan Feinman

Editor's note: This interview by fellow independent online news publication Cardinal News is republished with permission. See below.

Virginia officials couldn’t figure out why their economic development pitches in Southwest and Southside Virginia were getting them nowhere. 

The Tobacco Region Revitalization Commission, tasked with helping spark economic growth in those regions, had plenty to offer industries in the middle of last decade, said the commission’s former executive director, Evan Feinman. Good sites, strong workforces, plenty of highway and rail access and competitive incentive packages still came up short.

Commission members and their local partners wanted to know why, Feinman said. They began talking to the decision makers and site selectors who were opting for other locations. What was missing, those executives told them, was broadband internet access.

It wasn’t enough to have fiber going to the industrial site, they said. The communities needed access. If a boss couldn’t email a plant manager at 2 a.m. with an urgent request, a company wasn’t going to move in, Feinman remembered hearing.

“And that was when the light bulb went off,” Feinman, a Lynchburg native, said.

The Tobacco Commission paid for 3,000 miles of rural broadband. Soon, then-Gov. Ralph Northam would call on Feinman for another job, as the commonwealth’s chief broadband adviser. Feinman’s work developing statewide broadband deployment got attention in Washington, D.C., where the Biden administration called on him to run the new $42 billion Broadband Equity Access and Deployment program, also called BEAD.

Feinman’s three years there ended this month, and the Trump administration did not reappoint him, but he made some noise on his way out. In a March 16 email that received wide media attention, he told colleagues his concerns that the Trump administration will lean too heavily on low-earth orbit satellite connections, a field dominated by Elon Musk’s Starlink, over what is generally considered higher quality, more dependable broadband fiber, and will in the process eliminate fixed wireless internet’s opportunities to compete in the market.

“The new administration seems to want to make changes that ignore the clear direction laid out by Congress, reduce the number of American homes and businesses that get fiber connections, and increase the number that get satellite connections,” Feinman wrote. “The degree of that shift remains unknown, but regardless of size, it will be a disservice to rural and small-town America.”

He added in bold type: “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.”

In a phone call last week from his home in Richmond, Feinman said his problem wasn’t as much with Musk as with the possibility that rural residents could get short shrift on connection quality. That’s the direction Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick appears to be headed, Feinman said.

“When we did rural electrification, we didn’t send some household battery packs, because they were just too far away,” he said. “We got everybody electricity, and we need to do as good a job at meeting that standard as we can.”

Feinman, whose public service includes a stint as the state’s deputy secretary for natural resources, discussed his background, his time running BEAD and some of the political attacks made on the program during the recent election cycle. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Cardinal: I wanted to start out with some background, knowing that you grew up in Lynchburg, and I wondered if your experiences there led you in this direction toward public service, or what was your path from there to kind of where you are now?

Feinman: Well, I was born on a stormy night. No, you know, it’s been an interesting road. As you said, I grew up in Lynchburg, Virginia, which was an interesting place to grow up, the child of some Democratic-leaning parents in the heart of Jerry Falwell’s sort of nascent Moral Majority.

I then went to UVa. That was really where I determined that I wasn’t likely to just kind of work for a paycheck. That never really made a lot of sense to me. I wanted to be involved in public service. And so I did a little campaign work while I was there and wound up getting a fellowship to study energy and transportation policy, and then actually got to go advocate for the ideas that came out of my research throughout state governments in New England, to do a little bit of federal work. 

That was a good couple of years. I then came back to Virginia to go to law school at W&L [Washington and Lee University]. Had a wonderful time there and really, I knew then that I was unlikely to ever be like a lawyer lawyer. I have a great deal of respect for people who are in the profession and do it well, but don’t call me if you need a lawyer, [there are] far better.

I was able to treat it as a really excellent education, in both the way that the legal and governmental and constitutional systems of our country work as well as a three-year seminar in how to be an excellent advocate and communicator of complex issues.

So I did that and then … got on a congressional [campaign] right out of law school, then wound up spending some time at the Commonwealth Institute, which is a budget and fiscal policy think tank, a really, really, really wonderful organization that was really focused on doing hard-nosed analysis of Virginia’s budget choices. And that kind of rigor was really absent from the discourse, and I think entirely too often remains absent from the discourse around what is actually happening here. Can we look at what’s efficient, what’s inefficient, what’s a good use of public funds, what’s not, and then what does that mean for things like education, health care, infrastructure?

Terry McAuliffe, who at the time had lost the 2009 [Democratic gubernatorial] primary, in part because he was perceived as not really being of Virginia, was spending a lot of time in our office at the Commonwealth Institute learning about, getting the scholarship on, Virginia issues. He took that very seriously, and he asked me along the way if I would join him on a campaign and be his policy director.

That was successful in 2013. I followed the governor in the office. I spent some time as deputy secretary of natural resources. He then sent me to take over and reform the Tobacco Commission, and that was an organization that needed reform. I feel pretty good about the work that we were able to do there.

My first hire was a data scientist. We tried to get very serious and rigorous about how we funded what and why, as well as also look at the fiscal situation that the agency was in. When I started there, they were burning 15% of the principal of the endowment every year. When I left, we were on a stable fiscal trajectory. 

We realized really early that the commonwealth — the part of the thing that we had our hands on with the commission — needed to be investing in getting broadband infrastructure to the communities that it served, or we were not going to be able to generate the economic future that we were obliged by our mission to do for those communities. 

The leadership of the commission, especially [Del.] Terry Kilgore, [the late Del.] Frank Ruff, Del. Danny Marshall, were really instrumental — Frank Ruff in particular was a real hero in this — instrumental in making a pivot toward significant investments in connectivity for Southside and Southwest Virginia. And we wound up laying thousands of miles of fiber and really setting up the region to be successful, especially when Gov. Northam, at the time the lieutenant governor, made universal broadband connectivity a huge part of his campaign. 

When he came into office, I was actually thinking about leaving government. He asked me to stay on to continue to lead the commission, but also to be his chief broadband adviser and to scope the problem and develop a plan to get universal coverage and then implement that plan. 

We were pretty successful in that endeavor. The [Virginia Telecommunication Initiative] program wound up when I was there going from about a million dollars a year to leveraging between public and private capital of over $2 billion in projects that we’re going to get a significant percentage of the commonwealth up to universal coverage.

That work has continued, and continued quite well under Gov. [Glenn] Youngkin, after a short delay at the beginning of his term. I’m very proud of the work the commonwealth is doing. I still believe the commonwealth is going to be the first large state in the union to achieve universal coverage, and you can see that in the first BEAD [funding] round that just concluded. The commonwealth received hundreds of applications representing well over 90% of the locations being applied for, and I think it’s very likely that you’re going to be able to get, barring interference from the Commerce Department, I think it’s very likely that you’ll see a a universal fiber network or a nearly universal fiber network in Virginia, that’ll come in on time and under budget.

Cardinal: I do want to talk a little bit about the concerns you have related to the Commerce Department, but let me step back for just a second and ask you this: You have said previously that BEAD is as close to a startup inside of government as you can get. What was the process for you to get that job? Was that something that you were interested in or is that something that the Biden administration reached out to you for?

Feinman: They reached out to me. The work we were doing in Virginia had gotten some attention, and [BEAD] — this had to get negotiated out as all congressional legislation does — but the program was designed in part, informed by the work that we’ve done in Virginia. And so it was fairly natural, I think, for them to reach out to folks who’ve been involved in the creation of the Virginia program and see if I was interested in taking on the leadership of the BEAD program.

And when I got there, there was no staff, right? I mean, there were staff at [the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, which oversaw Feinman’s work], but I was the first BEAD hire, and we had to build the whole team. I was able to identify and hire folks in nearly every state capital in the union, as well as a bunch of really talented communicators and attorneys and policy folks, managers. We have broken the country into seven regions and hired regional directors for each of those regions.

It is a project that has been fairly or unfairly criticized for going too slowly, but is now approaching the finish line, and it’s really going to deliver for the American people and for rural America, and it was really great to get to build.

I also can’t say enough about the team that came on with me to do it. A tremendous number of the people that joined the BEAD team took enormous pay cuts to do so. Multiple of them took six-figure pay cuts to come be public servants, and I told every one of them when I was hiring them, if you’re looking for a cushy, feet-on-the-desk, 30- or 40-hour-a-week government job, this ain’t it.

That team has been going, going, going, 50, 60 hours a week for years, along with our colleagues at the state level to deliver this program, and it’s as I said, some states are in the end zone and just need to be allowed, need to be awarded their points. … We’ve got to punch this thing in.

Cardinal: You mentioned that the program was criticized, fairly or unfairly, for having taken so much time. In my experience covering broadband deployment just in Virginia, I found that so much of the deployment set up by the pandemic relief fund, the American Recovery Plan Act money, was not yet completed, and that’s still the case. Plus there’s a whole plan for BEAD that each state had to craft in order to get the approval.

Feinman: And that’s the thing. The design of the program is why the program will be successful but also is why the program took longer. It’s relatively easy to run a top-down [effort], no engagement with the community, no engagement with the state. … And that does have the benefit of getting money out the door quickly, if that’s what your goal is. But look at how the RDOF actually worked out, the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund that the FCC ran [with reverse auctions]. Their plan was to fund $11 billion in projects. They wound up only awarding four, and of the $4 billion, nearly half of those projects have defaulted at this point. A tremendous number of them have fallen apart. 

The way [BEAD] was designed from the moment the law was passed was we were required to use the FCC’s map. It was a year and a half before the FCC had a map that we could use. 

Then states had six months — and remember, Virginia had a strong program, but a majority of the states in the country didn’t have broadband offices at all. And so we had to develop capacity at the state level so that they could actually implement this program, because it’s not a federally led program, it’s a state-led program, which again is why it’s going to work. But it does mean that it’s going to take longer, and it was harder and more complicated. 

They had six months to get us their initial proposals, which is the blueprint for how they’re going to do it. After that, NTIA had to approve that proposal. And while some states wrote us a very strong initial proposal, other states did not. So it took some time going back and forth with the states to negotiate with them a way to make their policy priorities work while still proposing a plan that was going to affordably and effectively deliver high-speed internet connections to every citizen in that state.

Then the state has a year from the moment that gets approved to … write up their final proposal and get it to NTIA. … A year to get us the final proposal takes us to three years. That is the timeline that was laid out by the statutory requirements that were put into the law, and by the way the program was designed to run. 

It’s also worth noting states had a ton of agency here. It is a state-led program. The states that wanted to move fast — Louisiana, Delaware, Nevada, West Virginia, Connecticut — they’re basically done, not with building, but with running the program, and they could have shovels in the ground now. 

Other states that had a more complicated row to hoe — Texas, it’s not their fault that they’re one of the last states across the finish line — but they moved more slowly and deliberately. North Carolina, really high-capacity broadband office, but what they said was, we’ve got a couple billion bucks worth of ARPA projects going right now. That’s going to take a while and we’re going to go slowly and we’ll turn our attention deliberately to BEAD at the timing that makes sense for us as a state.

That’s my response to the you-went-too-slowly criticism.

Cardinal: When you said fairly or unfairly, were there fair criticisms that you looked at?

Feinman: Look, I think that you could certainly quibble with individual decisions about were we too exacting in our standards for this state, that state, or the third state plan, but at the end of the day, I think the criticism that it was going too slowly was largely unfair.

What we are talking about is infrastructure that should and will serve these communities for 30 years or more. This is an investment of billions of taxpayer dollars, and we were from the get-go aware, deeply aware, that this represented a significant public trust and that our duty was to get it right. And that was our first and foremost consideration, was make sure these funds are used wisely to create the best outcome for the communities that we’re going to serve. And that’s the program that Americans can expect to get, barring the significant changes that the current administration is contemplating.

Cardinal: Virginia was among the first three states, if I recall correctly, to receive approval, and the government promised $1.48 billion to Virginia. 

Feinman: And that money has been obligated to Virginia. That money is in Virginia’s account with the federal government … but it could still get screwed up, so the worry is these changes [that could come under the new administration].

Cardinal: You spent some time running BEAD in this new administration. What have you seen as far as how they’re doing things that were different from how it was before?

Feinman: I’m very concerned that the new secretary of commerce — who I believe to be a smart guy and who has accomplished a lot in his career — came in with a misunderstanding or some mistaken belief and directed the team at NTIA to dramatically increase the use of satellite service and decrease the usage of fiber. Fundamentally, that’s the directive. And it remains to be seen exactly how that directive will be implemented, or whether it will be implemented. 

The reason I kicked up this fuss is because there’s still an opportunity for the Trump administration to do the right thing here. There is a big difference, and folks in the communities Cardinal News serves and throughout rural America know the difference between satellite and fiber. And they know what their communities need to be successful. 

Starlink is a cool technology. It’s also an important and useful tool in our toolbox. I’m not attacking Starlink for what it is. For a set of locations and applications, Starlink is a wonderful technology to have available for airplanes, for boats, for very remote locations. It’s a great option, but when you look at the impact on the community and the end user, the download speeds you get on Starlink usually cruise around a little over 100 megabits per second download, but often go far lower than that, and bounce between 20 and 25 megabits per second upload and often go far lower than that.

And that costs you at your home around 120 bucks a month [with an initial dish price of $500]. And of course the quality of that connection declines the more people near you have it.

Fiber, on the other hand, while it does cost more upfront to build, can deliver a gigabit, 1,000 megabits per second download and 11,000 megabits per second upload, for 40 or 50 bucks a month for the homeowner. And by the way, we’ll be able to scale from there. That’s just sort of the base package, the high end of what fiber can do today is many gigabits. It can fully accommodate not just the usage that people use today, but the usage that people are going to  use in 10-20 years. 

Cardinal: Over the course of the political campaign season, a lot of complaints aired about diversity, equity and inclusion requirements in BEAD. You wrote in the email that the new administration will first remove “the ‘woke’ requirements” from the program. You also wrote that you didn’t regard these provisions as significant. They were for messaging and political purposes, never central to the mission of the program, nor significant in the actual conduct of the program.

Feinman: I didn’t write that [legislation]. I will say more hay was made of that than it makes sense to have and we should be clear about what’s true and not true. 

There is no union labor requirement in BEAD. Anybody can use union or non-union labor on a BEAD project, and anybody can pay any legal wage to any person building the BEAD program. There is no climate change requirement in the BEAD program. There simply isn’t. It doesn’t exist. There is a climate resiliency. We use the word climate. Maybe that was a mistake, but what we really mean there is weather. If you’re building a fiber network in Florida, we wanted to make sure that we thought about does it make more sense to spend more money up front and bury these fibers, or does it make more sense to put them on the poles recognizing that those poles are going to get blown down in a hurricane sooner or later, and we’re going to have to put them back up?

That to me, I think is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. 

Cardinal: Is there anything that I have missed or haven’t thought to ask you that you feel is important for readers to know, based on your time with NTIA and what people can look to going forward?

Feinman: There has been a bipartisan understanding in Virginia that the right thing to do is to bring every Virginia community an affordable, reliable, high-speed internet connection. That was true when we were talking about the leadership of the Tobacco Commission. That was true when we were talking about the bipartisan support for significant VATI [Virginia Telecommunication Initiative] funding in the budget. That was true when Gov. Northam was governor and that’s true now when Gov. Youngkin is governor. 

This is not and should not turn into some kind of partisan issue. It isn’t. This is about doing the right thing and keeping an economic future for communities that, man, you know, are just recovering from the last time they got kicked around by the federal government [via the job losses brought on by the North American Free Trade Agreement]. And it would be an incredible disservice to that part of the world that I’ve spent an awful lot of time and energy — though not to rival the actual leaders of the community that live there — but it’s been an awful lot of time and energy trying to support, and I just don’t want to see them get shortchanged again. 

There is still time for folks to speak out and get the Trump administration to do the right thing here, and I truly don’t think they understand the impact of these choices. If we could just get folks’ attention — and you know, Secretary Lutnick, President [Donald] Trump, they don’t want to listen to some Democrat named Evan Feinman, that’s fine.

I hope people who they do trust and who they listen to will speak out and let them know what the right thing and the wrong thing to do here is, because that’s really all I’m trying to make happen. I want to see this work out for the hundreds of thousands of folks in Virginia and the millions of folks across the country who are relying on this opportunity to keep their communities in the game. 

There isn’t a great track record of folks in rural communities getting a fair deal, and you know, this is one of those times we were going to do right by them. We’re really in the red zone and we’re about to score, and it looks like it’s going to get taken away from folks, and I just hate to see that happen.

This article and interview by Tad Dickens of the Cardinal News was originally published on March 24, 2025, and is republished with permission.