Gomez: Preserve Remaining State Control of BEAD
The FBA president said he was optimistic states would ultimately be able to maximize fiber deployment.
WASHINGTON, July 2, 2025 – Federal Communications Commissioner Anna Gomez said the Commerce Department should not overrule state decisionmaking as part of the agency’s $42.45 billion broadband expansion program.
Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration handed down new rules for the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program last month, rescinding Biden-era approvals and requiring all states to hold an additional round of bidding.
“When it comes to federal infrastructure investments like BEAD, the government should place trust in the communities the investment is meant to serve,” she said. “States that submitted plans for the use of BEAD funding after months of planning and analysis have been told to start over, and not because their plans lack merit. That’s not right.”
FROM SPEEDING BEAD SUMMIT
Panel 1: How Are States Thinking About Reasonable Costs Now?
Panel 2: Finding the State Versus Federal Balance in BEAD
Panel 3: Reacting to the New BEAD NOFO Guidance
Panel 4: Building, Maintaining and Adopting Digital Workforce Skills
Gomez, a Democrat, spoke at a Wednesday Fiber Broadband Association webinar.
The new rules remove the Biden NTIA’s explicit fiber preference and instituted a new national scoring rubric for states to evaluate projects. President Donald Trump’s administration has been critical of fiber’s higher upfront deployment cost and touted Elon Musk’s satellite ISP Starlink. Musk was the biggest Republican donor in the 2024 election and until recently was a close advisor of the president, but the two have been publicly feuding over Musk’s opposition to the GOP’s budget bill.
State broadband offices, which are the ones making awards under the program, generally want to fund as much fiber as possible while still connecting everyone in their state. States that released draft spending plans were planning to fund fiber to a majority of their locations, although some larger western states have predicted a lower percentage.
“The states have done the work. We should respect that process and their expertise,” Gomez said. “They have assessed the terrain, consulted their communities, and identified the technologies that make the most sense for their geography, their population and their future.”
There’s potentially still room for states to favor fiber, provided the Commerce Department doesn’t step in and veto them, something the agency has said it would do if states are “unreasonable.”
Applicants using any technology can apply to be considered with priority in the new bidding rounds, a label the Biden NTIA had determined applied only to fiber. Priority projects get first consideration and are required by law to be able to scale easily for increased data demands in the future.
States will effectively be deciding that on an application-by-application basis now. Experts have noted states could reasonably say fixed wireless and satellite don’t meet the statutory definition in most places and still give fiber the first shot.
It’s not yet clear if Commerce will intervene if states take that approach.
The new rules give states “a significant role in discerning whether a given project falls within” the priority project definition, according to the agency’s BEAD FAQ document.
FBA CEO Gary Bolton, who spoke with Gomez on the webinar, also criticized the new BEAD rules recently, saying the extra time spent on revising the rules and now holding another bidding round would shorten the 2025 build season and risk FBA member investments.
He was also optimistic about the law’s scalability requirement, though.
“It is important to note that the BEAD Restructuring Policy Notice, still maintains that priority broadband projects must meet the statutory requirements for scalability, and we know that only fiber is capable of meeting this metric,” he wrote. “In the end, we believe that state broadband directors will have the ability to maximize fiber deployment.”
Universal Service Fund
Gomez said she was “very relieved” that the Supreme Court upheld the FCC’s roughly $9 billion-per-year broadband subsidy program Friday.
She said lawmakers working on modernizing the fund – something that is broadly agreed to be necessary – should prioritize an affordability aid for low-income households. She said she worried infrastructure investments would be unsustainable if people in low-income and rural areas weren’t able to afford the connections.
“I don’t want to build a bunch of bridges to nowhere,” she said.
The USF is funded by fees on interstate voice revenue, a pool of cash that’s shrinking as expenditures remain roughly flat. A bipartisan group of lawmakers in both chambers of Congress recently reconvened a working group aimed at modernizing the fund.
ISPs and FCC Chairman Brendan Carr have supported tapping revenue from big tech companies along with broadband providers, something the software giants predictably oppose. Gomez said that whatever lawmakers do, they should take pains to prevent consumer bills from increasing significantly.
