Assistant Secretary Roth: One Year of Results at NTIA

On July 30, 2025, Arielle Roth was sworn in as Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Communications and Information and National Telecommunications and Information Administrator. Over the past year, NTIA has moved with urgency to deliver results for Americans: ensuring universal broadband availability, freeing spectrum for commercial innovation, advancing American technology leadership, strengthening public safety communications, and demanding greater accountability for taxpayers. "We returned the BEAD program to its statutory mission of ensuring universal broadband availability through competition, accountability, and respect for the law. Thanks to the Benefit of the Bargain reforms, the program is on track to connect every American while reducing costs by $21 billion and securing almost $12 billion in private matching funds. We took a program that, in some cases, was on track to spend more than $100,000 per location—an abuse of taxpayer dollars that threatened to leave Americans behind—and put it back on a fiscally responsible path. We accelerated deployment by approving state plans in record time, restoring the technology-neutral approach required by law, and making cloud-based permitting tools available to dramatically shorten environmental review timelines. We also revamped our Tribal broadband programs, cutting red tape and better aligning Tribal deployment efforts with BEAD. That course correction is already translating into broadband connections. The majority of states have signed contracts with providers, putting deployment into motion across the country. Nebraska and Louisiana became the first states to connect households under BEAD, and in states with signed agreements with low-Earth-orbit satellite providers, many households are accessing service immediately. By removing technology bias from the program, we enabled states to choose the technologies that can connect Americans fastest and most cost-effectively."