In an op-ed written for the Wall Street Journal, Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Communications and Information and National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) Director Arielle Roth said Washington, D.C. will receive no deployment funds in Broadband Equity, Access, Deployment (BEAD) Program funding, citing several problems with the district’s requests.
Roth noted that Washington, D.C.’s BEAD proposal would spend an average of $70,000 per location, and that some of these locations were spurious, including a shed, a nonexistent building, and an open field.
“Congress in 2021 tasked the National Telecommunications and Information Administration with administering a $42.45 billion program to make universal broadband available across America. Yet for years, the program didn’t connect a single household,” Roth wrote.
“When project costs didn’t pass the smell test, we demanded answers. Under the Biden administration, officials conditionally approved projects at more than $100,000 per address — numbers impossible to justify to taxpayers. So when D.C.’s proposal crossed our desk with similar red flags, we took a closer look.”
She added that there were already many broadband providers in the Washington area, so gaps — which were unlikely — could be filled by them rather than by BEAD funding.
Additionally, when the NTIA asked Washington, D.C. for updated BEAD bids, the revised ones came in at about $6,000 per location, a decline of 90%.
“How does a $70,000 bid drop to $6,000 with no material changes? Did these locations require federal funding at all?” Roth wrote.
“These concerns weren’t hypothetical; D.C. has a history of questionable broadband mapping. The Senate Commerce Committee’s 2023 Red Light Report found that 58 of 184 supposedly unserved D.C. locations were inside the National Zoo — including Lion-Tiger Hill and the Butterfly Garden. When a third of ‘unserved’ addresses turn out to be zoo exhibits, diligence should be a no-brainer.”
Washington, D.C. was originally allocated $100.7 million of BEAD funding. So far, the capital is the only state or territory that has had the entirety of its deployment funding denied.
Last week, Roth addressed the $21 billion in remaining BEAD funds that have not yet been awarded to states and territories.
