Louisiana Contractor Joins Fiber Providers Urging BEAD Progress
Two BEAD winners urged the Commerce Department to allow the state to move forward last week.
WASHINGTON, April 30, 2025 – A Louisiana broadband construction company is joining two local fiber providers in asking the Trump administration to move forward with a $42.45 billion broadband expansion effort.
“We signed leases, bought equipment, rented warehouses. We invested in software, training, and local partnerships,” Josh Ethridge, co-owner of EPC, wrote in a Monday letter to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. And now – we’re stuck. Not because we didn’t do the work. Not because we weren’t ready. But because of bureaucracy and politics.”
The Commerce Department is planning to alter the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program to, among other things, “take a more technology-neutral approach” – the Trump administration and GOP leadership have opposed the program’s preference for fiber, citing its relatively higher cost to deploy.
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States expect the new guidance to come in mid-May, but it’s not yet clear how sweeping the changes will be or if work will have to be redone.
Louisiana, along with Nevada and Delaware, was given federal approval on its BEAD awards in January, but the spending plans have been under a budgetary review since President Donald Trump took office. The state was set to spend more than $700 million to get service to its last remaining unconnected areas.
In the lead up to the program and in the wake of the awards, EPC increased in-house and subcontractor hiring, bought extra equipment, and contracted with BEAD winners in the state on planning work.
Ethridge said in an interview that the ramp up, combined with existing customers scaling back builds, had put a financial strain on the company. He said he had already laid off 11 in-house employees.
Two Louisiana BEAD winners wrote to the Commerce Department last week outlining similar concerns.
Ethridge said the subcontractors he coordinates with, who also built up capacity in anticipation of the influx of projects, were already being strained.
“I’m going to tell you, a lot of them are just going to go out of business due to the delay,” he said. “I receive no less than five to six calls a day from subcontractors going ‘Hey man, do you have enough room for my two crews?’”
More than 40 states have begun the process of fielding grant applications under the current BEAD rules, with many into the process of evaluating those submissions. Three states chose winners and received federal approval on their final spending plans in the final days of the Biden administration, but they’ve been under a budgetary review since Trump took office.
West Virginia, which had finished its plan, was given last month an extra 90 days to conform the document to the administration’s priorities. The Commerce Department issued a blanket 90-day extension for all states last week.
The NTIA, the agency within Commerce managing BEAD, did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but said in the waiver it was looking to “remove unnecessary rules and mandates, to improve efficiency, take a more technology-neutral approach, cut unnecessary red tape, and streamline deployment.”
“If this continues, you will have effectively weaponized a great ambition – meant to lift up and transform rural America – against the very people who believe in this administration,” Ethridge wrote in his letter. “We supported our newly elected leaders – with our money, our words, and our votes – believing you would support us in return. And now? We hear nothing.”
State broadband offices, as well as state and federal legislators, have also expressed concern about further delay or disruption from the upcoming rule change. More than 100 state lawmakers wrote to Lutnick earlier this month to urge against a major change, and senators, including some Republicans, pressed Trump’s pick to head the agency within Commerce that handles BEAD on the issue. The nominee, Arielle Roth, has been critical of the fiber preference and has yet to be confirmed.
A key question is whether the administration will institute a per-location spending cap, above which states would be forced to fund non-fiber technologies like fixed wireless or satellite, and how high it would be. BEAD’s former director, Evan Feinman, told colleagues in an email he expected to see one when he left the agency.
Experts have said a sufficiently high cap could be accommodated without as much disruption, but a lower cap could force states to redo bidding processes.
