Last week, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas released a letter to the National Telecommunications and Information Association (NTIA) in which he questioned the NTIA’s administration of the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program.
The letter, addressed to Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Communications and Information Alan Davidson, strongly condemned the NTIA’s handling of BEAD funding.
“This past August, I sent you an inquiry regarding NTIA’s decision to hoard nearly $1 billion in BEAD funding to build a central planning bureaucracy that proceeded to impose extraneous mandates on the states and prevent the expeditious delivery of internet access to unserved communities,” Cruz’s letter stated.
“Instead of working to reverse course on the botched BEAD program, your agency responded by doubling down on its extralegal requirements and evading congressional inquiries.”
Senator Cruz, who will become Chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee in January when the Republicans retake control of the Senate, wrote:
“As Chairman, I will monitor this matter… Congress will review the BEAD program early next year, with specific attention to NTIA’s extreme technology bias in defining ‘priority broadband projects’ and ‘reliable broadband service’; imposition of statutorily-prohibited rate regulation; unionized workforce and DEI labor requirements, climate change assessments; excessive per-location costs, and other central planning mandates.”
Cruz is one of the two senators representing Texas, whose Initial Proposal for the BEAD Program was recently accepted, becoming the final state of the 56 states and territories to have funding approved. Texas received $3.313 billion in BEAD funding, more than any other state.
“Substantial changes are on the horizon for this program,” wrote Cruz. “With anticipated new leadership at both NTIA and in Congress, the BEAD program will soon be ‘unburdened by what has been’ and states will no longer be subject to the unlawful and burdensome bureaucratic obstacles imposed by the Biden-Harris NTIA.”
While Cruz is critical of the NTIA’s handling of the BEAD Program and the timeline of grants, other voices within the industry feel the funding process has not been too slow.
“I think the worst thing that could have happened is if they had rushed out the door and just started making multimillion-dollar investments to areas that already had broadband, or if they had underestimated the unserved areas. I think they were being prudent,” Shirley Bloomfield, CEO of NTCA–The Rural Broadband Association, told Telecompetitor last month.
