House Republicans Urge Trump to Release Broadband Funds
As GOP calls for speed, former BEAD chief warns of policy shifts.
Jericho Casper
WASHINGTON, June 6, 2025 – Even top GOP lawmakers called on President Donald Trump this week to release funding for a $42.45 billion broadband expansion program and let states start building.
In a letter sent Thursday, Reps. Brett Guthrie, R-Ky., and Richard Hudson, R-N.C., urged the administration to accelerate the release of funds from the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program, which has been under review by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick since March.
“We appreciate that… Lutnick is undertaking a review of the program and urge any reforms to be enacted as soon as possible,” the lawmakers wrote. “Once BEAD is reformed, we ask that you act swiftly to release these funds to the states so they can begin deployment.”
But many states have warned that Lutnick’s proposed reforms – which were formalized in a new policy notice Friday – could undermine states’ strategies, forcing states to rebid projects using “technologically neutral” criteria.
“We’ve asked all the states to rebid,” Lutnick testified at a House Appropriations hearing Thursday, promising that only the lowest-cost technology per location would win out, even if that means replacing planned fiber builds with fixed wireless or satellite. “Whichever is the most efficient option to get somebody broadband, that should be the only rule,” Lutnick said.
As of publication Friday afternoon, Lutnick’s revised BEAD funding notice had just been released. States will have 90 days to comply with the policy overhaul that eliminates Biden-era requirements, prioritizes low-cost deployment, and requires states to reopen their broadband grant processes under new, technology-neutral rules.
States will now have to reconfigure existing plans – many of which were shovel-ready and months in the making.
One such plan was West Virginia’s, which former BEAD Program Director Evan Feinman described in an op-ed in Charleston Gazette-Mail Thursday as a “once-in-a-generation” infrastructure project that was $150 million under budget and promised to deliver a fiber-optic connection to every home and business in the state that needed one.
Feinman warned that federal changes could strip fiber from rural communities and replace it with satellite service, a change West Virginia Gov. Patrick Morrisey, R, has already signaled. The technologies differ in terms of speed, latency, data capacity, reliability, and long-term scalability.
“If the department pushes forward with these changes, it will lock these folks and these communities on the wrong side of a digital divide, with slower connections and higher monthly bills. Just the higher satellite bills alone will cost more than $800 extra a year, compared to fiber, a huge hit to family budgets just to get online,” Feinman wrote.
“Let’s be clear: The plan is finished. The companies and crews are ready to go. Y’all could start building this network tomorrow. But just as the hard work setting all this up begins to bear fruit, West Virginians are getting the rug pulled out from under them again,” he said.
