Are BEAD projects at risk under a Trump administration?

You probably haven’t heard much about internet policy in political commercials or on debate stages this year. But the results of the 2024 election will have a reverberating impact on the state of the internet that will be felt for decades to come.

“The good news about broadband policy is that it’s fairly bipartisan,” Blair Levin, a former chief of staff at the Federal Communications Commission and a telecom industry analyst at New Street Research, told CNET. “You will rarely find an individual politician, Democrat or Republican, criticizing the benefits of broadband.”

While politicians may agree that high-speed internet is a necessity in 2024, they have different ideas about how to achieve that and what’s best for the people who use it.

One of the biggest questions in broadband circles right now is what will happen to the $42.5 billion Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment Program, which was passed in 2021 to grow broadband infrastructure across the country. It was the largest investment the federal government has ever made in expanding internet access.

“I can’t tell you how many broadband plans for Michigan I’ve written over the last 13 to 14 years,” Eric Frederick, Michigan’s chief connectivity officer, said in a speech. recent interview. “It’s a lot. But we’ve never had an opportunity like BEAD to determine what we’re going to do with it.”

To gauge what might change in the coming months under a Trump administration, I surveyed a dozen industry insiders about the potential impact on the BEAD program. Here’s what they had to say.

Republicans may try to speed up BEAD rollout

Republicans would either cut the red tape for the largest investment in broadband infrastructure or interfere with a hugely complex project that is already well underway. It depends on who you ask.

Three years after it was passed as part of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, Republicans have been highly critical of the pace of BEAD’s rollout, as well as its mandate for low-cost plans.

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed published in mid-October, Republican FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr said hit KRAAL for its “diversity, equity and inclusion requirements, climate change regulations, price controls, preferences for union labor and plans that favor government-run networks.”

Roger Wicker, former Senate Commerce Chairman predicted that a second Trump administration will be “much better positioned to remove these external restrictions” on BEAD, which the National Telecommunications and Information Administration “added without regulatory authorization.” Senator Ted Cruz also added that Republicans would “consider every option” to address BEAD’s shortcomings if they were to win a majority in Congress.

Cruz has not outlined specific steps for how he would do this, but last year he called on states to return unused BEAD money if they already had sufficient funding from other federal broadband programs.

But at this point, the cat may be out of the bag when it comes to making changes to BEAD.

Speaking on a recent podcastAlan Davidson, head of the NTIA, the organization responsible for overseeing BEAD, dismissed Republicans’ criticism as “election year politics.”

“I’m not too concerned about the future of this program,” Davidson said. “I am optimistic that it will continue in this form because this is the right way to do it. It is the right answer to ensure everyone in America is connected.”

There may be only so much Republicans can do at this point to speed up the process. Frederick said BEAD’s existing timeline may be overly rushed.

“The timing issue I see is the actual construction of these projects,” Frederick said. “We have shortened the construction seasons [Michigan] the weather doesn’t help when it comes to construction. [Having only] Four years to build all these projects will be tough.”

Trump would shake up the NTIA – the organization that manages BEAD funding

Still, experts I spoke with suggested that BEAD projects could also be at risk due to changes to the NTIA. One source who spoke on condition of anonymity said they would expect the NTIA to be massively downsized in the event of a Republican victory.

In the Project 2025 blueprint, Thomas F. Gilman, former chief financial officer of former President Donald Trump’s Commerce Department, described the NTIA as suffering from “organizational malaise” and requiring “energetic leadership from political appointees.”

This mirrors an executive order Trump issued late in his presidency known as Schedule Fstripping federal workers of their protections and allowing them to be fired for political reasons. Schedule F was canceled in the early days of Biden’s presidency, but could be reinstated if Trump wins. That could have a huge impact on the NTIA – and by extension, BEAD.

“If Trump does what he said on Schedule F and you replace a lot of government officials with a lot of political loyalists, there could be huge delays in the BEAD projects because many of the people who actually manage it at the NTIA are government officials. Levin explained.