NTIA to BEAD Winners: ‘Know Your Rights’

WASHINGTON, May 11, 2026 – The Commerce Department doesn’t want state broadband offices signing contracts with ISPs that alter requirements for a $42.45 billion grant program.

The agency told ISPs to notify a federal program officer if a proposed contract attempts to “alter a subgrantee’s rights or fails to include required language,” according to a memo posted Monday by the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society. Subgrantees are what participating ISPs are called under the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program.

“If a state omits or alters required language, it is out of compliance with BEAD requirements,” the agency wrote. “That puts the subgrant — as well as the state’s award — at risk.”

Arielle Roth, head of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration, said the agency was working on the “know your rights” document at an April 27 NTCA event.

The agency’s required language was an effort “to protect the subgrantees from these regulatory experiments that undermine the success of their project,” she said at the event. “Ensuring that language is in the subgrant agreement, as well as permitting commitments that the states have made, is very important.”

She said NTIA wanted to prevent both states and ISPs from using the contracts formalizing BEAD awards as a means of circumventing agency rules. SpaceX, a major nationwide winner of BEAD funding, asked states to agree to looser performance monitoring in its contracts, something Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick publicly shot down during a February Senate hearing. 

NTIA drew attention in the memo to its rule that states must agree not to enforce net neutrality or broadband rate laws on BEAD participants. That rule, which applies throughout an ISP’s entire state footprint, was instituted in June 2026 when the Trump administration updated BEAD’s rules.

Failure to include stock NTIA language to that effect in ISP contracts “is a breach of BEAD program rules. Subgrantees should ensure such language is present and notify their Federal Program Officer if it is not,” the agency wrote.

Most states are in the process of hammering out the terms of their contracts with broadband providers that won BEAD funding. 

Drew Garner, Benton’s director of policy engagement, said in a post Monday that NTIA appeared to have begun circulating the memo “days after” a press release from New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D), also on April 27, touting both BEAD and the state’s Affordable Broadband Act. The law caps monthly broadband prices for low-income households and is considered targeted by the NTIA rule against rate regulation.

The New York broadband office said in an email last week that the state had not yet signed its ISP grant agreements. On the subject of ABA, a spokesperson would only say that “all internet service providers in New York must follow all applicable laws — including the ABA.”

California, which has a longstanding net neutrality law, is one of just two states that have not yet received NTIA approval on their tentative BEAD winners. But other states with similar net neutrality laws have cleared that milestone.

The memo also said states had to commit to establishing a procedure to ensure broadband permits were approved or denied within 90 days. That includes a single point of contact for broadband permits, “Deference on the construction techniques chosen by BEAD subgrantee,” and “Streamlined processing through permitting by rule, batch processing of substantially similar permit requests; and protection from unnecessarily duplicative or burdensome permitting requirements” according to the document.

NTIA emphasized states will have to take steps to minimize permitting fees and establish permitting roundtables of relevant agencies, including federal and Tribal entities, and companies to iron out disputes.

Each state will additionally have to track and publicly post data on unresolved permitting disputes related to BEAD projects, according to the memo.

Garner noted permitting provisions like the dedicated contact person reviews of local permitting fees were unfunded, and that BEAD non-deployment funding could be used to ensure broadband offices can meet them. It might be difficult for states to impact federal and even local permitting, he wrote, as they don’t have authority over those permitting entities.

Roth has spoken positively about using non-deployment funding to speed permitting reviews, but the agency hasn’t ruled on how states will be able to use the money – more than half the program’s budget after Trump administration efforts to bring deployment costs down. Guidance on that was supposed to be released in March but has been delayed.