The Supreme Court has finally ruled to uphold the constitutionality of the Universal Service Fund, and telecommunications industry groups issued statements en masse praising the Supreme Court’s decision. But as they celebrated the end of the legal battle, they acknowledged there’s still a long road ahead for USF reform. “As welcome as this decision is, the underlying threat to the Universal Service Fund remains, with the program's funding shrinking by the day,” said Gigi Sohn, executive director of the American Association for Public Broadband. Telecommunications companies are currently required each quarter to contribute 36.6 percent of interstate and international service end-user revenues to the USF. But that pool of money continues to dwindle as fewer consumers subscribe to traditional telephone services. This issue, coupled with the demise of the Affordable Connectivity Program, “means that the promise of the USF program—to deliver affordable broadband directly to homes, schools and libraries, and rural communities—remains unfulfilled,” Sohn added. 

The Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment Restructuring Policy Notice of June 6, 2025, greatly narrows the vision embedded in the original BEAD program. The previous approach recognized that digital equity and complementary policy measures, such as workforce development programs, boost the social and economic benefits of high-speed Internet access. In contrast, the revised PN aims at minimizing BEAD program outlays for broadband access. Although efficiency and expediency are desirable, the new approach risks jeopardizing even the more modest remaining goals of BEAD. For one, the PN creates tensions between short- and long-term planning that eligible entities may struggle to reconcile. This ambiguity is further aggravated by uncertainty about how the National Telecommunications and Information Administration will conduct final reviews. To avoid these pitfalls, State Broadband Offices will have to establish appropriate incentives for the benefit-for-the-bargain round, supplemented with robust methods for the evaluation of bids. Most importantly, they must select an appropriate time horizon for determining BEAD outlays, and they must put mechanisms in place that help improve the trustworthiness of bids.

The North Carolina Department of Information Technology’s Division of Broadband and Digital Opportunity announced Maggie Woods as the new director of the Office of Digital Opportunity, Christina Strickland as chief deputy general counsel, and Dana Lee as deputy general counsel. The division was created in May 2021 to expand access to high-speed internet, computers, and digital skills to all North Carolinians. As director of the Office of Digital Opportunity, Maggie Woods is responsible for overseeing the division’s $50 million in economic development efforts to ensure North Carolinians have the skills and technology needed to compete for jobs. Christina Strickland joined NCDIT in June 2025 as chief deputy general counsel for the department and general counsel for the division. She will provide legal guidance for all programs, including the $1.5 billion Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment program that will expand high-speed internet access to homes and businesses across the state. Dana Lee joined NCDIT in March 2025 as the division’s deputy general counsel. In this role, she has finalized contracts between counties, internet service providers, and NCDIT for more than $255 million in high-speed internet projects that will connect nearly 70,000 North Carolina homes and businesses in 83 counties.

North Dakota State Broadband Program Director Brian Newby prefers not to beat his head against a federal agency over which he has no control. “Just tell me the rules. We’ll follow the rules.” Officially, North Dakota only has about 2,000 locations left without broadband, though Newby thinks that after the bogus broadband locations are removed, the number may be closer to 1,000. Those locations are spread throughout the state—Newby and his team call them “Swiss cheese locations”—and, as a result, the state didn’t receive many Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment applications when their application window first opened. “There must be two types of states,” Newby said. Some “have a crazy number of bidders. And then I think there’s a fair number of states like us, where we’ve just had two bidders.” Newby hopes the two providers who originally bid for—and were preliminarily selected for—BEAD funds will bid again in the new "Benefit of the Bargain" round. “Now that they know this is kind of a final round, they may look at the state and see if there are [other locations] they want to bid on.”

EchoStar Chairman Charlie Ergen is buying himself some more time to work out a deal with the Federal Communications Commission, making more than $500 million in debt-interest payments and delaying an imminent potential bankruptcy filing. The interest payment was revealed in an 8-K filing, in which EchoStar answered a couple of questions that were looming over the company. For one, it doesn’t look like a bankruptcy filing is happening as soon as once thought because EchoStar is making at least one of the interest payments coming due. For another, it’s still hoping to reach some kind of resolution with the FCC after agency Chairman Brendan Carr threatened to take away certain spectrum licenses. But EchoStar clearly isn’t out of the woods yet. It elected not to make interest payments of about $114 million that are due on July 1, triggering another 30-day grace period. That ups the ante in what many analysts describe as a “game of chicken” that’s going on between EchoStar and the FCC. EchoStar has the cash to make its interest payments, but it’s using the threat of a bankruptcy filing as negotiating leverage with Chairman Carr, who, meanwhile, is threatening to take away some of Ergen’s spectrum licenses that allegedly aren’t being used.