West Virginia Governor Suggests Funding for Fixed Wireless, Satellite in Revised BEAD Plan
The state's original plan had been 100 percent fiber, according to the program's former director.
Jake Neenan
WASHINGTON, May 27, 2025 – West Virginia’s governor indicated his state’s reworked plan for the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program would include funding for non-fiber technologies like fixed wireless and satellite, where it previously had not done so.
“We’re expanding the definition of service to include not only fiber but also fixed wireless and satellite, particularly in our mountainous and remote regions where traditional infrastructure is impractical or cost-prohibitive,” West Virginia Gov. Patrick Morrisey (R) wrote in a Saturday op-ed for the Herald-Dispatch. “This gives us a greater reach, faster timelines, and a smarter investment of taxpayer dollars.”
In late March, West Virginia was the first state to be given a 90-day extension on its deadline to submit a final spending plan under the $42.45 billion BEAD program. The state described it at the time as an opportunity to “finalize the proposal in a manner consistent with the program changes being proposed by the Trump Administration.”
The extension was handed down after Morrisey met with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. It was later extended to all states and territories, giving the Trump administration more time to finalize plans to alter the program’s rules.
The Commerce Department has been critical of the program’s preference for fiber, which can be more expensive but is capable of transmitting much higher quantities of data. The agency is expected to hand down new guidance this summer to, among other things, take a more “tech-neutral” approach. It’s not clear to what extent the new guidance will require work in states like West Virginia to be redone.
Contrasting himself with lawmakers – including from West Virginia – who have blasted the Trump administration for putting BEAD on hold at the federal level, Morrisey said he was aligned with the Commerce Department.
“Contrary to the myth that West Virginia is somehow dragging its feet, the opposite is true,” he wrote. “Under our leadership and with the full support of President Donald Trump, we are moving faster, smarter, and more collaboratively than ever before.
The state’s original slate of BEAD winners wasn’t made public, but Evan Feinman, the former director of the program said it would have got fiber to each of the state’s 114,000 eligible homes and businesses. He said the state would have spent about $1.05 billion of its $1.2 billion allocation on the infrastructure.
West Virginia “was done” with its plan, he said last month on the Institute for Local Self-Reliance’s Community Broadband Bits podcast, and “had an incredible universal fiber solution for every single West Virginia home and business, ahead of schedule and more than $150 million under budget.”
While the state is revising that plan, it hasn’t publicly solicited additional bids from ISPs. West Virginia’s BEAD application process wrapped up last year, and in total more than 40 states have begun or finished their own bidding process.
West Virginia was not required under current BEAD rules to exclusively fund fiber like Feinman said it ultimately did, but fiber does get first priority. States can fund non-fiber projects in areas where no qualifying fiber bids come in or if fiber would be too expensive, a determination states can for now make themselves.
Shelley Moore Capito, a Republican Senator from the state, has been publicly critical of the Trump administration’s handling of BEAD and repeatedly asked Lutnick to allow her state to move forward without major changes. She told reporters on May 16 she was in “close contact” with Lutnick’s team to “reinforce the frustration that I feel.”
Capito wrote in a May 7 letter to Lutnick that wireless technologies would be more difficult to deploy in West Virginia because much of the state is forested.
“While I am all for tech neutrality and easing lots of burdensome requirements like the labor mandates – if a state wants to use fiber they should be able to,” she wrote in questions to Arielle Roth, Trump’s pick to head the agency within Commerce that handles BEAD. Roth, whose confirmation hearing was in March, has yet to be confirmed.
Feinman and Congressional Democrats have warned the new guidance could improperly benefit Elon Musk, a major GOP donor and advisor to President Donald Trump who owns satellite ISP Starlink. Amazon’s nascent competitor, Kuiper Systems, has also been competing for BEAD dollars, winning a now-paused grant in Nevada and going through the pre-application vetting process in many of the same states as Starlink.
Roth agreed in response to questions from Democratic senators that it would be a “bad outcome” if rural areas got worse connectivity in service of making Musk richer, and said she had not interacted with him or discussed his views on telecom policy in her current role on Capitol Hill.
