NTIA Rewrites Rules for BEAD, Forcing States to Rebid Broadband Projects
But NTIA declines to issue high-cost threshold
WASHINGTON, June 6, 2025 – The Trump administration Commerce Department on Friday issued a policy notice dramatically rewriting the rules governing the $42.5 billion broadband infrastructure program.
The administration rescinded three state broadband plans approved by the Biden administration, required a new round of bidding by broadband providers, opened priority projects potentially to non-fiber technologies, and temporarily rescinded approval for all nondeployment funding – pending future guidance.
However, Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration declined to adopt a nationwide high-cost threshold, the cost per location at which a priority project could lose out to a cheaper non-priority project.
States also do not need to entirely rerun their broadband challenge process, but will have to take into account the presence of unlicensed fixed wireless for their eligibility maps.
The guidance from NTIA, the agency responsible for the massive program, will update the Notice of Funding Opportunity that had been required within six months of the November 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, and was issued in May 2022. That prior NOFO put elaborate rules in place for states to develop “initial proposals” and “final proposals” before they could receive funds under BEAD.
“Today we proudly announce a new direction for the BEAD program that will deliver high-speed internet access efficiently on a technology-neutral basis, and at the right price,” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said in a statement.
State awards rescinded
The agency rescinded its approval of final proposals from Louisiana, Delaware, and Nevada, which it had greenlit under the Biden administration. Those documents include the grants a state is planning on awarding to ISPs under the program.
They, along with all other states and territories, will have 90 days to submit new final proposals after conducting an additional round of bidding. The policy notice said NTIA would approve those final proposals within another 90 days. States will also have 30 days to request a correction to their approved initial proposals, which outline how a state is going to administer its grant program, to align with the new policy notice.
Already Friday afternoon, Alabama said it was pausing its project selection process. Indiana’s broadband office told stakeholders it would “be in touch with all providers soon.”
Glen Howie, director of the Arkansas broadband office, said his office “will carefully evaluate the updated guidance and chart a path forward that ensures full compliance while preserving the integrity, structure, and momentum of our existing, nationally leading program. As always, our priority is to deliver results—not red tape—and to eliminate the digital divide in Arkansas with speed, accountability, and transparency.”
Arkansas had finished its application process and selected preliminary awards for almost all of its eligible locations.
Another round of bidding
States will be required to hold at least one additional round of bidding on top of the ones that 44 states have already begun or completed.
The round “must permit all applicants – regardless of technology employed or prior participation in the program – to compete on a level playing field undistorted by the non-statutory regulatory burdens eliminated” in the notice, the agency wrote.
States will also have to reopen their prequalification process if they have closed, including to ISPs that had previously failed to qualify, and can make providers submit prequalification materials as part of the application.
The prequalification process was separate from the application process in many states, and was the process by which states vetted potential applicants and decided whether they could participate in the state’s BEAD program. Some states had ISPs submit qualification materials with their project applications.
States will have 90 days to select winners and submit new final spending plans.
Priority projects and scoring
For the new bidding round, dubbed by NTIA as the “Benefit of the Bargain Round,” the agency scrapped its definition of “priority broadband projects,” which had under the Biden NTIA been limited to fiber.
Priority projects still get preference over non-priority applications by default, and states can look to non-priority projects when no priority providers are interested in a given area, or if states decide it would be too expensive given their budget.
Non-priority projects were defined under prior rules as all non-fiber projects – things like fixed wireless or low-earth orbit satellite service.
The new guidance allows providers using any technology to ask that states consider their application a priority project, but they will have to submit evidence they meet the definition outlined in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. That includes download speeds of at least 100 megabits per second, upload speeds of at least 20 Mbps, latency of no more than 100 milliseconds, and the ability to “easily scale speeds over time to meet the evolving connectivity needs of households and businesses and support the deployment of 5G, successor wireless technologies, and other advanced services.”
While states can’t categorically exclude a specific technology, it can still find a proposed project, e.g., a satellite or wireless project, won’t meet the statutory standard. But NTIA reserves the right to reverse a state’s “determination that a project does or does not meet the standard for a Priority Broadband Project if such determination is unreasonable.”
And the agency said states “shall reject a Priority Broadband Project if the cost of the project is excessive,” and reserved the right to override a state’s determination that a given project or specific connection was not too expensive.
“Interestingly, the guidance does still allow states to solicit evidence that applicants are able to provide the service they promise in project areas,” said Jessica Dine, a policy analyst at New America’s Open Technology Institute.
“LEO service generally doesn’t do well in particular geographies or in densely populated areas, so the outcome may hinge on how selective LEO providers are in their initial application.”
Some technologies like fixed wireless on unlicensed spectrum and LEO satellite were designated “alternative technologies” in the original BEAD rules, making them even lower on the funding priority list. The new guidance eliminated that distinction as well.
Scoring rubrics
The agency also handed down a rough scoring rubric that states will have to use when comparing project applications for the same area. The biggest criteria is cost. While priority projects still get first dibs, states “must select the combination of project proposals with the lowest overall cost to the Program.”
If a project is within 15 percent of the lowest-cost proposal for a given area, states can then consider speed to deployment and the technical capabilities of the technologies involved, as well as whether an application was already selected for an award before the new guidance was handed down.
“The relative weighting of these three criteria shall be at the discretion of the Eligible Entity,” meaning the state or territory, according to the guidance.
States can elect to maintain their existing award selection for a given area and can give special weight to those applications, but will still have to rescore them under the new rubric.
States could previously award points for discretionary categories like buried infrastructure, and fair labor practices and affordability were previously NTIA-required factors.
Not entirely rerun the challenge process
States will not have to entirely rerun their challenge processes, in which ISPs and nonprofits could contest government coverage data to determine which homes and businesses would be eligible for BEAD funding.
But states must now take into account the presence of unlicensed fixed wireless, which was excluded from challenge processes as it was an alternative technology. Under the previous rules states would have had to verify the presence of unlicensed fixed wireless service if they were looking to fund an alternative technology in a certain area.
Before the new bidding round, states will have to review the Federal Communications Commission’s coverage map to see where unlicensed fixed wireless coverage is reported by ISPs in their state. They’ll have to send those providers notice that they have seven days to confirm that they intend to provide evidence BEAD funds aren’t necessary in their coverage area. The ISPs will then have seven more days to submit that evidence, which the state will weigh and decide whether to keep or remove the locations at issue from their eligibility map.
States will also have to revise their list of community anchor institutions, places like libraries and hospitals, which have to get faster speeds from BEAD-funded projects. NTIA said it “hereby revokes the more expansive definition adopted” by the Biden NTIA and “will closely review all CAI submissions and will narrowly interpret the term ‘community support organization’ as used in the statute.”
Rules eliminated
The agency eliminated a slate of Biden-era rules it said were superfluous and “made the BEAD Program more complex and expensive, stifled competition, and led to reduced participation levels.”
Those included the NTIA’s previous low-cost service option requirement. The Infrastructure Act requires providers make some kind of low-cost plan available to low-income households connected to BEAD infrastructure, but the agency had previously pushed states to lay out a specific price point or formula that would be used to determine what constituted a low-cost plan. Under the new guidance states can no longer do that, leaving it to applicants to define their own low-cost plans.
“To be clear, NTIA will only approve Final Proposals that include [low-cost plans] proposed by the subgrantees themselves,” the agency wrote.
The agency also modified the eligibility criteria to align with the FCC’s Lifeline program rather than the expired Affordable Connectivity Program, which was more expansive.
NTIA also eliminated a policy of preferring publicly owned ISPs, requirements that applicants consult with community groups, a provision that prohibited data caps, and various fair labor and nondiscrimination requirements.
Also scrapped were climate resiliency requirements for initial and final proposals. States had already done analyses of likely extreme weather events for their initial proposals.
Applicants will still have to produce “risk management plans that account for technology infrastructure reliability and resilience, including from natural disasters (e.g., wildfires, flooding, tornadoes, hurricanes, etc.), as applicable, as well as cybersecurity best practices.”
Nondeployment funding
The agency said it would issue updated guidance on nondeployment funding in the future, but tentatively rescinded approval of all nondeployment activities.
Some states have already used nondeployment funding for things like workforce development. NTIA said it would “will not reimburse” states for “any new costs associated with previously approved non-deployment activities incurred after the date of this Policy Notice,” and that they should consult with the agency if they believe they are entitled to reimbursement for expenses already incurred.
Louisiana, one of the states that had received final approval under the Biden administration, had planned to spend more than $500 million on nondeployment, including efforts to expand rural healthcare and remote learning.
