Justifying Cuts to BEAD

National Telecommunications and Information Administration Assistant Secretary Arielle Roth recently made a speech at the Hudson Institute that outlined her policy positions related to reshaping the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program. The changes to BEAD were initiated by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and are now being finalized and implemented by Assistant Secretary Roth. The bottom-line impact of the changes will be to cut the amount of spending from the BEAD grant program roughly in half, with the savings returned to the Treasury. Assistant Secretary Roth says that the changes are not just about saving money. Her position is that the cuts being made are to make sure that the government doesn’t distort or sabotage the pace of technological innovation. I know Assistant Secretary Roth is looking for a good argument for awarding all of the locations in a rural county to satellite instead of fiber—but this argument is not it. The truth is that the NTIA changes to BEAD are only about saving money. NTIA could have completed the BEAD grant award on the same timeline by deciding to spend the full $42.5 billion, but they chose not to. They whacked the spending in half and are now searching for a clever way to justify their choices. I can’t think of a more ludicrous argument than one that says that spending more BEAD money on fiber would somehow sabotage the overall pace of broadband technology innovation for the country.