Digital Beat

Navigating a Wave of BEAD Permits

Oral Testimony of

Drew Garner

Director of Policy Engagement

Benton Institute for Broadband & Society

Before the House Committee on Energy & Commerce

Subcommittee on Communications & Technology

"Examining Solutions to Expedite Broadband Permitting"

Chairman Hudson, Chairman Guthrie, Ranking Member Matsui, Ranking Member Pallone, and Members of the Subcommittee.

Thank you for the opportunity to speak with you today.

The United States is about to make the largest broadband investment in our country’s history. This investment—the $42 billion Broadband, Equity, Access, and Deployment Program, or BEAD—has the potential to drive high-quality, affordable broadband to every last home and business in rural America.

But BEAD’s historic levels of deployment will put historic pressure on permitting authorities. And this is especially true in rural areas, where permitting capacity is lowest and BEAD activity will be highest. Such permitting bottlenecks are a fundamental threat to BEAD’s success.

Fortunately, Congress gave BEAD the power to fix those bottlenecks.

Congress did not restrict BEAD to simply buying spools of wire and satellite dishes. No, it mandated that BEAD fund initiatives to ensure networks are deployed on time and deliver maximum value to their communities. These “non-deployment” uses—which were written by bipartisan members of Congress—give BEAD the ability to promote things like workforce development, artificial intelligence (AI), and, to the point of this hearing, permitting improvements.

In fact, until recently, states were planning to use non-deployment funding to address many of the topics we will discuss today—surging staff capacity to local governments, streamlining and modernizing permitting processes, and increasing transparency and standardization. But that all ended on June 6 when the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) fundamentally restructured BEAD.

Before June 6, BEAD was poised to bring reliable, affordable, high-speed internet service to millions of rural Americans. A handful of states were even ready to begin construction.

But then NTIA’s leadership hit the reset button. They created new rules to make BEAD prioritize cost-cutting over everything else, and they gave states a mere three months to implement the changes (an impossible task, as time would show).

Suddenly faced with the expensive prospect of reengineering applications for a now-unfavorable program, many internet service providers (ISPs) dropped out.

And now we are seeing the consequences. All 56 states and territories have discarded their original BEAD plans. Over forty have submitted restructured plans. And none have been approved to begin construction.

Preliminary results indicate that the mixture of technologies has shifted markedly away from fiber and toward low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite, with Kuiper and Starlink ranking first and second in terms of locations won.

Yes, most locations will probably still get fiber. But their distribution is extraordinarily uneven, with some states achieving over 90% fiber and others under 10%. Such low outcomes are devastating for rural communities; they know better than anyone that only fiber can guarantee their connectivity. Those who don’t get fiber now might never get another chance. And as AI and other innovations demand more and more bandwidth, these communities will fall further and further behind.

BEAD also no longer addresses the primary cause of the digital divide— affordability. Thanks to the restructuring, a subscription that would have cost $30/month may now cost in excess of $80/month. If people can’t afford to use the networks their tax dollars built, what was the point in building them?

Unfortunately, NTIA is about to restructure BEAD yet again. The agency will soon roll out price caps that are designed to cut fiber from state plans with all the precision of a lawnmower. NTIA’s goal, seemingly, is to increase the amount of non-deployment funds so that they can claw it all back.

The impact on states and ISPs will be disastrous. For example, in North Carolina, the upcoming changes could drop the state from 68% fiber, 30% satellite, to nearly 50/50 and cut over one billion in non-deployment funds from the state’s budget. Other states would not fare much better. ISPs, including many small ones, could lose well over half their funding.

NTIA’s Chief of Staff recently said that BEAD “is a deployment program. Not a non-deployment program.” That is wrong. It is wrong on the law, and it is wrong on principle. BEAD is a connectivity program. And that is why bipartisan members of Congress designed it to address all aspects of the digital divide. NTIA’s misunderstanding of its own program not only threatens billions of dollars in non-deployment funding, it risks the connectivity for millions of rural Americans who desperately need it.

Thank you.

Read Garner's full written testimony here.

Drew Garner is the Director of Policy Engagement at the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society.

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.

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