What BEAD frontrunner states tell us about the federal award approval process

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) doesn’t appear to have made major changes to states’ award recommendations in the Benefit of the Bargain round in the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment (BEAD) Program—at least not based on analysis of NTIA award approvals for several states. NTIA made relatively small changes to the award recommendations that Louisiana and Maine submitted in the Benefit of the Bargain round. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is not making any changes to awardee lists that have been approved by NTIA. In other words, once NTIA has approved a state’s award recommendations, the federal approval process for those awards is complete.  Almost all 50 states have now received NTIA approval on their final BEAD proposals. The NTIA-approved final proposals include the award recommendations and reflect any changes made by NTIA to what the states recommended. Getting hold of award lists, as approved by NTIA, is no small feat, however. Some states declined to share those lists until they had signed contracts with all awardees. Others did not respond to our inquiry. Meanwhile, the NTIA spokesperson said that “while we are trying to get the final NTIA-approved plans for each state/territory up on our website, it’s a big lift.” The spokesperson noted that “we must work with all 56 states and territories to clean up their proposals to be sure we are only sharing information allowable for public consumption.”