Thomas Tyler Leaving Louisiana Broadband Office
He served as the agency’s deputy director since 2021.
WASHINGTON, Feb. 27, 2026 – After serving as a top official in the Louisiana broadband office since 2021, Thomas Tyler is stepping down as the agency’s deputy director.
“I won’t pretend there’s a dramatic exit story here; the truth is simpler,” he wrote in a Friday email to stakeholders. “I came into this work believing that connectivity is infrastructure in the most fundamental sense.”
Getting the massive investment from the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program right “meant jobs, healthcare access, education, and economic mobility for communities that had been waiting far too long,” he wrote. “As the program now shifts from subgrantee selection into full project implementation, this feels like the right moment to step away.”
Under Tyler and ConnectLA Executive Director Veneeth Iyengar, Louisiana has frequently been a first mover in implementing its slice of the $42.45 billion broadband expansion program. It was the first to get federal approval on tentative grant awards under the Biden administration, and was the among first tranche of states to get approval again in November after the Trump administration required an additional round of bidding under new rules.
It was also the first to sign contracts with grant winners and begin disbursing money under the program last week. Louisiana was allocated more than $1.35 billion under BEAD and is going to spend nearly $500 million to connect 127,000 locations.
Tyler was also the broadband officer for its administration of more than $176 million in Treasury grants, which are set to reach 65,000 locations in the state.
“None of this happened alone,” he wrote in a LinkedIn post. “I'm deeply grateful to all of our partners, especially our Louisiana-based companies, who are serving the hardest-to-reach communities,” plus federal and local government partners and “our state leadership who championed connectivity as an economic imperative.”
Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry, a Republican, had urged the Trump administration not to majorly upend the program as it considered new rules, and pushed for states to retain flexibility in how they spent their allocations.
Tyler said he planned to continue working on connectivity, but didn’t specify his next move.
“As for what’s next, I’m not ready to say everything just yet,” he wrote in the email. “But I’m not done with this space. The hardest parts of connecting unserved America – implementation, compliance, and accountability – are still ahead. I expect to stay in that fight, just from a different angle.”
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