28. Federal Communications Commission · Notable
Direct federal broadband funds to communities without service
Printed page 855 28. Federal Communications Commission
“To that end, the next Administration should instruct the various departments and agencies that are administering broadband infrastructure funds to direct those resources to communities without adequate Internet infrastructure instead of to places that already enjoy broadband connectivity.”
What has happened
- Partially done
NTIA approved the last of the 56 state and territorial BEAD Final Proposals, so every award in the program has now been made under the restructured rules. The Assistant Secretary put the resulting savings at about $21 billion, which NTIA has been consulting on how to spend rather than redirecting to unserved locations by rule.
- Partially done
NTIA restructured the $42.45 billion BEAD program by Policy Notice, modifying and replacing parts of the 2022 Notice of Funding Opportunity and making compliance a condition of Final Proposal approval. Its section 4, Optimizing BEAD Locations, is the piece that answers this ask: eligible entities must strip from their location lists anything already served by an enforceable commitment or by non-subsidized service, must account for locations served by unlicensed fixed wireless before awarding funds, and must certify that funded locations are unserved or underserved. One agency and one program, though — the Quote asks for an instruction to the various departments and agencies administering broadband funds, and no government-wide instruction was found.
Research log
What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence
Research notes
- The Quote’s own example is Treasury’s 2022 rules governing $350 billion of American Rescue Plan funds. Treasury did not revisit them: the Corpus has no Treasury Federal Register document in the window touching the State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds, the Capital Projects Fund or broadband. Nor does USDA’s ReConnect program appear.
- No presidential action in the window mentions broadband at all — a title-level check of the
Corpus’s 617 whitehouse.gov presidential actions, which carries titles only, paired with a
Federal Register full-text search for
"national broadband strategy"(0 since 2025-01-20). So the government-wide instruction the Quote asks for does not exist; what exists is one agency reforming its own program. - Shares its Evidence with #2213, which reads the same Policy Notice for the overbuilding prohibition rather than for where the money goes.
- Action
- restrict
- Object
- Federal broadband infrastructure funds
- ID
- 2212