‘One Word: Yikes’: Broadband Leaders Blast BEAD Rule Changes
Experts warn of lawsuits, chilling effect on fiber participation, and favor toward satellite
June 16, 2025 – What do you get when you invest $250 million in a presidential campaign? According to some broadband policy experts, a rewrite of federal broadband rules that could be worth billions – and a furious reaction from the fiber industry.
That was the subtext in a fiery discussion among broadband policy experts during an emergency episode of Connect This! on Monday, June 9, in the immediate wake of the June 6 announcement of the Trump administration's Commerce Department rewriting the rules for the Broadband, Equity, Access, and Deployment program.
The event, one the first quick reactions to the changes, was a vociferously negative one. Some panelists accused Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick of acting to benefit satellite providers, and one high-profile Republican donor in particular – Elon Musk.
Panel 1: How Are States Thinking About Reasonable Costs Now?
Panel 2: Finding the State Versus Federal Balance in BEAD
Panel 3: Reacting to the New BEAD NOFO Guidance
Panel 4: Building, Maintaining and Adopting Digital Workforce Skills
The new rules, released June 6, eliminate the federal preference for fiber and require states to reopen their BEAD grant windows under a compressed 90-day timeline. They also shift the program’s focus to a “lowest-cost-per-location” model – a change that panelists said could tilt billions in funding toward satellite providers like Musk’s Starlink, while sidelining fiber-based projects that states have spent years preparing.
At stake, they warned, is the integrity of the government’s most ambitious broadband investment effort to date.
“One word: Yikes!” said Heather Mills, principal consultant at Tilson, when asked for her reaction to the changes. “I don’t think anybody has any faith at this moment that things won’t change [again] in the next 24 hours – depending on how many people [complain] to the White House that this is an unreasonable timeline,” or that it just “doesn’t make sense.”
Blair Levin, a policy analyst at New Street Research and nonresident senior fellow with Brookings Metro, followed up with a jab: “Or Musk tweets something negative about the president – and someone in the White House realizes the Secretary of Commerce just did Musk a real solid last Friday.”
He continued, “Musk invested just $250 million in the campaign and he’s getting a rule that will make him billions. I mean that is definitely the benefit of the bargain… for him.”
Throughout the hour-long episode, hosted by Christopher Mitchell, director of the Community Broadband Networks Initiative at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, participants discussed what impacts they believed the changes would have.
“I don’t think anyone really thought long and hard about the lowest-cost bid being the way that this would go,” said Lori Adams, vice president for broadband policy and funding strategy at Nokia.
“I haven’t talked directly with any ISPs, but I’ve heard from some states, that there is hesitancy to continue with the BEAD program as a fiber provider for obvious reasons,” Adams explained. “I think that’s going to have a significant chilling effect on the applicant pool, and it’s kind of ironic: the benefit of the bargain round may actually reduce the number of applicants.”
Participants predicted that states will react quickly to the new changes, given the new 90-day deadline.
“With this extreme 90-day deadline there’s no time to sit, think about it, and react,” Adams said. “We’ll know soon enough whether there’ll be lawsuits, we’ll know soon what the states are doing and how they’re updating their maps. This is all going to play out very quickly
“In about three to four weeks,” she explained, “every state is going to be opening up their grant window because they’ve got to have time to review everything, negotiate and do their final proposals,” Adams continued. “The question I have is: [Are] companies capable of submitting applications simultaneously in 20, 30, 40, 50 states?”
The sheer logistics of preparing dozens of applications across multiple states at once will likely cap how much funding any single company can secure, Adams said.
“The big question mark to me is not what the federal government does, but what the states do,” Levin chimed in. “If all 50 states were to write a note saying ‘Your time-table is completely unrealistic for the following reasons,’ what is Lutnick going to say?”
“I think we’re likely to see a lawsuit,” Mills predicted. She dismissed the idea that states could meet the 90-day timeline, saying the realities of government bureaucracy are likely to slow things down far more than some expect.
