Breaking silence on the remaining funds for the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program, Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Communications and Information and National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) Administrator Arielle Roth noted today that the BEAD Program has so far achieved $21 billion in savings through the Trump Administration’s Benefit of the Bargain reforms.
The next step is to address what to do with those saved funds.
“We appreciate the voluminous and passionate responses to our call for input,” Roth said in a prepared statement about the BEAD funds. “Participants and commenters have raised interesting ideas, including funding permitting improvements and workforce-related training, enhancing public safety communications, and using some of the funding to ‘clean up’ any remaining unserved locations.”
Those comments came through three listening sessions, which included than 1,700 attendees and 175 speakers, as well as from 188 written comments from industry, state officials, and broadband advocates.
More commentary is expected next week at the State Broadband Leaders Network Winter Summit in Washington, D.C.
“While our guidance was expected by next week, we are taking additional time to review the comments and finalize our approach to ensure these funds are spent as efficiently and responsibly as possible,” Roth said about the remaining BEAD funds. “American taxpayers work hard for their money and deserve nothing less from this Administration.”
However, getting additional BEAD funding could be challenging as a Trump administration executive order issued late last year would prevent states from receiving BEAD non-deployment funds if they do not cede control of artificial intelligence (AI) policy to them.
Section 4 of the executive order, which is entitled “Ensuring a National Policy Framework for Artificial Intelligence,” mandates identification of “state laws that require AI models to alter their truthful outputs, or that may compel AI developers or deployers to disclose or report information in a manner that would violate the First Amendment or any other provision of the Constitution.”
The next section of the executive order ties AI policy and BEAD non-deployment funds together and suggests states not complying with the federal response to the earlier section’s findings could be punished.
