Navigating a Wave of BEAD Permits

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.