Since 2020, Congress has steered tens of billions of dollars, including more than $50 billion from the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, through federal agencies to connect homes and businesses that lack high-speed internet access (broadband). Four agencies account for most of that money: the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA, an agency within the U.S. Department of Commerce), the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), and the Department of the Treasury. Their combined portfolio includes NTIA's $42.5 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program, the single largest deployment effort in the group and the one still furthest from completion.

In June 2023, the House Appropriations Committee asked the  U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) to evaluate the efficacy of recent federal broadband deployment programs in reaching unserved and underserved areas:

On August 31, GAO published its answer in Broadband Deployment: Agencies Should Take Steps to Better Target Underserved Areas and Consider Sustainability.

GAO reviewed nine federal programs run by the four agencies above and analyzed FCC's Broadband Funding Map (a database that aggregates project-level data across agencies) for eight of the nine programs. GAO excluded BEAD from the quantitative analysis because NTIA began submitting BEAD data to the map only in fiscal year 2026. GAO also interviewed officials at all four agencies, 12 program participants (three state broadband offices—Missouri, New Mexico, and Texas—three Tribes, and six providers), and eight stakeholder organizations, including the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society. The audit ran from July 2024 to August 2026.

In short, GAO could not produce the return-on-investment comparison Congress's mandate implicitly calls for because the underlying data are too inconsistent across programs to support such an analysis. Instead, GAO delivered four narrower findings: 1) progress on distributing and completing projects varies widely by program; 2) the FCC's process for correcting its broadband maps may be discouraging exactly the smaller communities and providers whose input is most needed; 3) NTIA has not built a way to check on the financial health of BEAD-funded providers after they finish construction; and 4) permitting, historic-preservation, and environmental reviews remain a persistent complaint agencies are only partly addressing.

Who is affected: residents of the highest-cost, least-profitable areas the private market has been unwilling to serve on its own—the population these programs exist to reach—plus every state broadband office managing a BEAD allocation, every Tribal government and rural provider that has to navigate the FCC's broadband-map challenge process, and every rural or tribal community whose provider defaulted on a prior federal award and now sits in a kind of no-man's-land under program non-duplication rules.

What GAO Found

GAO organized its review around three questions—agencies' progress deploying broadband, how they target underserved areas while avoiding duplication, and how they're addressing sustainability, permitting, and review challenges—and reached four findings.

Finding 1: All nine programs are distributing money, but completion timelines diverge sharply

As of February 2026, when BEAD's first subrecipients received funds, all nine programs had begun distributing money. But "progress on completing projects varies." 

GAO also flagged data-quality problems it found and had corrected during the audit:

• USDA misapplied updated data specifications, misclassifying 19 ReConnect projects (awarded $267 million to connect 14,100 locations) as fiscal year 2026 and therefore excluding them from the analysis
• Location-count "irregularities" in USDA data generally, including one ReConnect project recorded as serving 32 locations when the approved application specified 189, and a Community Connect project recorded as serving one location versus 48 households in the application; and
• FCC's underlying data specifications were inconsistent across agencies, prompting the FCC to revise them and fix errors, in part because of GAO's review.

Finding 2: FCC's broadband-map challenge process may be screening out the communities it most needs to hear from

Agencies target funding using the FCC's National Broadband Map, which relies on provider-reported data and a "challenge process" that allows governments, providers, and consumers to dispute inaccuracies. GAO reports that three of 12 program participants and three of eight stakeholders—including a local government, a tribal government, and industry associations representing rural cooperatives—described the bulk-challenge process as "overly burdensome." One participant said it required submitting separate service-availability evidence for each individual location rather than using readily available geospatial data, which was "prohibitively labor intensive" and ultimately deterred them from filing a challenge at all.

FCC has taken steps in response—refining response codes, holding workshops, issuing a May 2026 notice seeking further comment—but GAO's own assessment is that "it is unclear whether FCC releasing a call for comments will reach smaller participants," since smaller providers may not monitor FCC's website and may filter emails or letters that look automated.

GAO's conclusion: "Without a targeted outreach process to engage with smaller communities... and providers to identify and address these difficulties, FCC may not be able to collect the most accurate information about broadband serviceable locations and broadband availability." This led to Recommendation 1 below.

Finding 3: NTIA has no mechanism to check whether BEAD providers stay financially sustainable after construction ends

In October 2025, NTIA added a requirement that BEAD subrecipients (the providers actually building networks) certify in writing that they will not accept federal funding—including FCC High Cost funding—for deployment or operations at BEAD-funded locations for at least 10 years, a period NTIA calls the "federal interest period." NTIA's stated purpose is to ensure BEAD projects are "financially self-sustainable without additional federal funding."

But GAO found a gap. NTIA's reporting requirements for states cover the 4-year construction period, not the 10-year federal interest period that follows. NTIA officials told GAO this is because the agency "considers the program's objectives to have been met when deployment is complete"— even though NTIA's own performance-measures policy notice acknowledges "there may be a basis" for states to request compliance data from subrecipients beyond the 4-year window, without saying what that basis is or when it would apply.

GAO's assessment: "NTIA risks that some projects may falter in the future before the state could potentially flag concerns and work with providers to prevent a possible service lapse for consumers." This led to Recommendation 2 below.

GAO's concern here is rooted in a documented pattern of defaults elsewhere in the portfolio. As of June 2026, more than one-third of the original Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF, an FCC High Cost subprogram) locations—about 2 million of 5.2 million—had been affected by provider defaults, representing $3.5 billion of the original $9.2 billion awarded. Because federal programs generally treat an area as "committed" once it has an award—even one that later defaults—some of these locations can miss out on other federal funding under non-duplication rules, according to three stakeholders and four participants GAO interviewed.

Finding 4: Permits, historic preservation, and environmental reviews remain a common complaint, with mixed progress

Sixteen of the 20 participants and stakeholders that GAO interviewed cited permitting, historic preservation, or environmental review delays as deployment obstacles. Examples GAO cites include:

• a participant who said obtaining a permit from a private landowner or the federal government to install fiber could add 9–12 months to a project with an unpredictable cost; and 
• another who had to hire two archaeologists to excavate a project corridor every 3 feet to catalog objects over 50 years old.

On the federal side, GAO's prior work on this exact subject found that the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the U.S. Forest Service missed or couldn't verify compliance with the statutory 270-day permit deadline for roughly half the applications reviewed. The Forest Service has since implemented GAO's recommendations, while BLM told GAO it plans to complete its remaining two recommendations by the end of August 2026 and the third by the end of December 2026.

The BEAD restructuring: a major mid-course policy change, described but not evaluated

In March 2025, the Secretary of Commerce announced a review of BEAD, stating the intention to "revamp the program by removing certain program requirements and taking a technology-neutral approach."  In June 2025, NTIA issued a policy notice that rescinded its prior approval of the three states' final proposals it had already approved, required every state to redraft its proposal under new rules, made deployment cost the primary scoring factor, and eliminated the original notice of funding opportunity's fiber preference, among other changes.

The two states that had already received final approval under the original framework didn't get final approval again under the new framework until about 11 months later, and a third state took over a year. NTIA told GAO its analysis of three states' revised proposals showed lower overall deployment cost, lower average and highest cost per location, and a "greater mix of technologies," while still meeting statutory and technical requirements. But GAO also reports that "some commenters, such as members of Congress and research groups, have expressed concern that the greater mix of technologies (i.e., less fiber and more fixed wireless and satellite) may result in some areas being served by networks that are less able to meet current and future needs, such as precision agriculture and other advanced or growing technologies." 

NTIA began approving the revised proposals in November 2025, and states began releasing funds to providers in February 2026—roughly a year after the March 2025 announcement. At the time of GAO publication, NTIA expected to award about $21 billion less in deployment funding under states' revised proposals than under their original ones. On September 3, 2026, NTIA announced it would let states redirect that $21 billion in savings toward a location "true-up," covering newly eligible unserved locations—including ones that emerged from provider defaults—that surfaced after states' final proposals were submitted.

Recommendations and Agency Responses

GAO made two recommendations:

1. To the Chair of FCC: conduct targeted outreach to smaller participants (local and tribal governments, providers) to identify and address the difficulties they've had completing the bulk challenge process.
2. To the NTIA Administrator: give states and territories information on when and why to request additional data from BEAD subrecipients, to help monitor and support their financial sustainability during the 10-year federal interest period.

FCC agreed and detailed the planned steps, including a Tribal workshop held in August 2026 and roundtables with local government and provider trade associations. NTIA agreed via technical comments.

GAO's two recommendations do not cover several other problems the audit documents. Among them:

• NTIA's tribal award review after the change in administration. NTIA began making round-two Tribal Broadband Connectivity Program infrastructure awards in November 2024, spanning the January 2025 change in administration. Fifteen round-two applications that the prior administration's NTIA had recommended for "full" award were then "subject to review for alignment with current administration priorities." Of those 15, NTIA determined that six were eligible only for smaller "equitable distribution" awards (capped at $500,000 per Tribe) rather than the full amount originally recommended, and that the remaining nine were "no longer being considered for award," with applicants notified that they were not selected. GAO reports this without further comment or evaluation of the review criteria used.
  • Subsequent development, outside the scope of the GAO report: On June 17, 2026, NTIA opened a third and reportedly final TBCP funding round, making up to $540 million available. The new notice of funding opportunity states that entities that previously received TBCP funding may apply again, but it says nothing about the nine round-two applications GAO reported as dropped. NTIA's public materials don't establish whether—or how—those nine applicants could compete for round-three funding. Round three also carries constraints that the GAO report doesn't address: the infrastructure award ceiling was cut from $50 million to $25 million per applicant; applicants are now weighted more heavily if their projects support BEAD deployments; and standalone connections to community anchor institutions were moved to the lowest-priority review tranche.
• The efficacy comparison Congress asked for. GAO concluded a cross-program return-on-investment comparison "would be misleading" given data inconsistencies—but made no recommendation toward closing the underlying data gaps (e.g., agencies' inconsistent methods for counting "planned locations") that make such a comparison impossible today.

GAO notes, but does not repeat, previous recommendations to these agencies that remain open. These are:

• National Broadband Strategy: That the Executive Office of the President develop and implement a national broadband strategy to better manage fragmented and overlapping federal broadband programs. Remained open as of June 2026.
• Tribal technical assistance: That NTIA provide technical assistance throughout the TBCP funding period to recipients unable to implement their financial sustainability plans, and that NTIA report to Congress on the resources necessary to ensure TBCP infrastructure projects' financial sustainability. NTIA agreed with both but had not implemented either as of June 2026.

Notes

1. The five High Cost subprograms GAO looked at are Connect America Fund Phase II Auction (CAF-II Auction), Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF), Bringing Puerto Rico Together Stage 2 Fixed Support, Connect U.S. Virgin Islands Stage 2 Fixed Support, and Enhanced Alternative Connect America Cost Model (E-ACAM).

The Benton Institute for Broadband & Society is a non-profit organization dedicated to ensuring that all people in the U.S. have access to competitive, High-Performance Broadband regardless of where they live or who they are. We believe communication policy - rooted in the values of access, equity, and diversity - has the power to deliver new opportunities and strengthen communities.

© Benton Institute for Broadband & Society 2026. Redistribution of this email publication - both internally and externally - is encouraged if it includes this copyright statement.

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