BEAD Unplugged Panel: Don’t Count on Receiving Non-Deployment Funds

WASHINGTON, August 13, 2025 – If states were counting on leftover BEAD funds for non-deployment projects, panelists at BEAD Unplugged warned Tuesday: Don’t.

“[Commerce Secretary] Howard Lutnick cares about making money and saving money,” Gigi Sohn, former Biden Federal Communications Commission nominee and executive director of the American Association for Public Broadband, said. “I believe he wants to… put that money in a bag and hand it to Donald Trump.”

“That necessarily means that he’s going to claw back that money,” she said.

Carol Mattey, founding member and principal of Mattey Consulting, shared the concern.

“I think that there is going to be a strong pressure to not spend the money, and therefore the states are going to end up falling short, and that’s really a shame,” Mattey said.

Under the Biden administration’s implementation of the $42.45 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program, states that have leftover funds after broadband was deployed to unserved and underserved locations may use that money to promote broadband adoption, affordability programs, workforce development, and connecting eligible community anchor institutions.

That provision has been halted under the Trump administration. On June 6, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration suspended funds for these projects, and told states that further guidance would be coming. Though no further guidance has been issued, many state broadband offices believe that the NTIA will claw back non-deployment funds.

The potential rescission of non-deployment funding was only one of many topics the panel discussed. Panelists discussed permitting reform, potential auctions of Citizens Broadband Radio Service and the 6 GigaHertz spectrum, and early results from states’ Benefit of the Bargain rounds.

They also reflected on the slow deployment of BEAD funding under the Biden administration.

“There was a lack of urgency under the Biden administration,” Lori Adams, vice president of broadband policy and funding strategy at Nokia, said. “There was a focus perhaps on all of the minutia and all of the minor little details that really bogged down the program with getting approvals out the door…that really created at least a year’s worth of delays in getting the money out the door.”

Mattey agreed, even calling some aspects of the the Biden administration’s delays on BEAD “unconscionable.”

“The fact that we had three states that were approved and then [the National Institute of Standards and Technology] didn’t do the paperwork to get the money out the door between those approvals in December and the inauguration is unconscionable," she said.

The Nokia Webinar, hosted by Broadband Breakfast and moderated by CEO Drew Clark, is available for free. Sign up to watch: