Capitol Hill Continues Pressure on BEAD

WASHINGTON, May 19, 2025 – Capitol Hill is keeping up political pressure on the Trump administration to leave intact state control of a $42.45 billion broadband expansion program.

A dozen Senate Democrats wrote a letter to President Donald Trump Friday urging him to move forward with the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program, which has been effectively paused at the federal level since Trump took office. They were the latest in a drumbeat of members of Congress, including some Republicans, and other stakeholders expressing concern about the program’s future.

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration has been reviewing the program and is expected to hand down updated rules this summer. It’s not clear if the more than 40 states that have begun or finished accepting and reviewing grant applications under the program will have to redo any work.

“The attempts by NTIA to revise the state application process at this late stage will cause further delays to the program and leave rural and tribal communities behind in an increasingly connected economy,” the lawmakers wrote Friday. “NTIA must act swiftly to release BEAD funding to states that have already been approved and expeditiously work to approve the remaining eligible applications.”

The letter was led by Sen. Jacky Rosen, D-Nev.

Last week, Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., wrote a similar letter to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, as did Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., earlier this month. Both pressed Lutnick to end the review and let the program move forward as-is.

Capito told West Virginia reporters Thursday that her team had not received a response from the Commerce Department. The state had finished awarding grants before being given a 90-day deadline extension to conform the document with Trump adminstration priorities, something later extened to every state and territory.

“We have, however, been in close contact with them to reinforce the frustration that I feel,” she said.

GOP  lawmakers have criticized various program provisions, like incentives for labor protections, efforts to promote diverse workforces and use women or minority-owned contractors, and BEAD’s preference for fiber. Altering the latter would be by far the most disruptive, experts say, because it relates to how project applications are scored and selected, a process already underway and in some cases finished under the current rules.

Current rules favor fiber, which can be more expensive but capable of handling much more traffic, but states can fund technologies like fixed wireless and satellite if no fiber providers are interested in a given area or if fiber would be too expensive.

States can for now decide the price point at which laying fiber would do more harm than good in their effort to secure coverage for every unconnected home and businesses. But there’s been speculation, including from BEAD’s former director, that NTIA might hand down a nationwide per-location spending cap that  forces states to direct funding elsewhere.

Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, questioned Paul Dabbar, Trump’s nominee to be Lutnick’s number two, on the issue, saying in written questions that “If a one-sized-fits-all per location cap is put in place for fiber for projects in Alaska, it is hard to imagine how any projects will be built for my constituents.”

Sullivan asked Dabbar if he would commit to deferring to states’ BEAD deployment decisions, to which Dabbar said “Yes.”

Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., asked Dabbar if he would release BEAD funds to the three states that got federal approval on the ISPs they selected for funding under Biden, and if he would preserve the state-level BEAD allocations made in 2023 – the amount of money each state broadband office ultimately has to spend on BEAD deployments.

Dabbar’s response to both questions: “Connecting every American to broadband is my top priority. If confirmed, I look forward to working with Secretary Lutnick and NTIA to expedite the BEAD program and get funding to the states, consistent with the law.”