House Dems Don’t Want BEAD Money Conditioned on AI Moratorium
They said the provision would violate the Byrd rule.
WASHINGTON, June 13, 2025 – More than two dozen House Democrats urged Senate Republicans to remove from their budget bill provisions that would cost states access to Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment dollars if they tried to regulate artificial intelligence.
“Linking critical broadband funding – intended to close the digital divide, support rural communities, and provide lifesaving services to our constituents – to the suppression of state-level AI oversight is both coercive and irresponsible,” the lawmakers, led by Rep. Doris Matsui, D-Calif., wrote to Senate leadership Thursday. “This sets a deeply troubling precedent: allowing essential public investments to be weaponized to block legitimate state policymaking on complex and consequential technologies.”
House Republicans had passed their version of the bill with language that would prevent states for 10 years from enforcing laws that “limiting, restricting, or otherwise regulating” AI models, aside from those aimed at easing development or deployment.
But budget reconciliation bills – which can pass the Senate with a simple majority – must only pertain to spending or revenue under the Byrd rule. In a bid to make the AI moratorium pass muster, Senate Commerce Committee Chair Ted Cruz added an amendment that would allow the Commerce Department to claw back states’ BEAD money and block states from receiving $500 million in new BEAD cash if they violated the moratorium.
For the 27 House Democrats, that didn’t cut it.
“The effort to make BEAD funding contingent on a state's decision to suspend any new AI regulations is not only a dangerous and sweeping policy change – it also plainly violates the Byrd rule,” the lawmakers wrote.
The Commerce Department handed down new rules for the $42.45 billion BEAD program on June 6, requiring states to hustle to update their maps and conduct another round of bidding, even those that had been previously cleared to begin work under the Biden administration. The new rules made it easier for non-fiber projects to compete for funding, but it’s not clear how heavily Commerce will tip the scales against fiber.
Cruz has said he expects the Senate to pass its version of the bill before July 4. The Senate parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, will first decide if the AI provision and other parts of the sweeping legislation are in line with the Byrd rule.
