Project 2025 Tracker / What’s done, what’s next

28. Federal Communications Commission · Minor

Require timely broadband permitting reviews by federal land agencies

Partially done

855 28. Federal Communications Commission

“so a new Administration should redouble efforts to require timely reviews and final actions by agencies with jurisdiction over federal lands, including the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service.”

What has happened

  1. Partially done

    Interior did require timely broadband permitting reviews inside the window — at the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and not at either agency the Quote names. National Policy Memorandum NPM-TRUS-48, *Streamlining the Rights-of-Way Application Processes for Broadband Infrastructure Projects Across Indian Trust and Restricted Land*, took effect 2025-09-03 and sets deadlines of exactly the kind this ask calls for: a right-of-way application must be encoded into the system of record **within three business days**, reviewed for completeness **within seven business days** with written notice to the applicant either way, and **within 60 days of a complete package BIA "will grant or deny the ROW, return the package for revision, or inform the applicant, in writing, that BIA needs additional review time"**; a granted right-of-way must be recorded within 30 days. Interior announced it on 2025-09-08 as cutting red tape to "speed up the process for approving tribal broadband infrastructure projects", and BIA ran three training webinars in September 2025. That is a mechanism in place, not a directive awaiting effect. Three limits keep it at `partial`. It binds BIA, and BLM and the Forest Service — the two agencies the Quote names — are untouched: the deadlines that bind them are still the MOBILE NOW Act's 270 days (2018) and BLM's communications-uses rule of 2024-04-12 with IM 2025-005 of 2024-10-21, both pre-window, and nothing since has tightened them. It reaches Indian trust and restricted land rather than the public domain and the national forests. And it is a one-year memorandum: the document's own header reads "Expires: 9/03/2026", and no renewal appears on BIA's broadband page, which still presents the policy as current.

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

  • Searched: Federal Register full text since 2025-01-20 for "broadband permitting" (0), "broadband infrastructure" "rights-of-way" federal lands (0), "communications use" authorization Forest Service (0), "broadband" "Bureau of Land Management" (6 — the Unified Agenda twice, the NPS categorical-exclusion adoption notice, an AI infrastructure RFI, and USDA’s NEPA rules) and "Forest Service" broadband deployment (3 — USDA’s NEPA interim final and final rules and the Unified Agenda). Corpus grep over all Federal Register files for Interior/Agriculture documents matching broadband or communications uses returns nothing on point.
  • blm.gov and fs.usda.gov are both open to a browser User-Agent. Read: blm.gov/about/laws-and-regulations/broadband-rule and blm.gov/policy/im-2025-005. Both describe the April 2024 rule and its 270-day decision commitment; neither records an in-window change.
  • The summit was opened on 2026-09-06 (read-queue ticket 07), and the earlier reading of it was right: an information session is not a requirement of timely review. What it did was surface the instrument that moved this item, which is not about BLM or the Forest Service at all. broadbandusa.ntia.gov opens to a bare curl throughout. The chain is the January 2026 newsletter → broadbandusa.ntia.gov/assistance/permitting → the summit event page → sites/default/files/2026-01/NTIA_BLM_Virtual_Summit_01-29_Presentations.pdf, a 655-line deck created 2026-01-29. What each presenting agency told the audience:
    • Forest Service — a National Broadband Action Team whose stated goals include “Shorten timeline to final issuance”, a 60-calendar-day screening step and a 270-day processing timeline, and categorical exclusions adopted from NTIA, Commerce, BIA and BLM to reduce the need for environmental assessments. The deck does not date the BAT or the timeline, and the 270 days is the MOBILE NOW Act figure the item already records. No in-window tightening is claimed.
    • BLM — “Right-of-Way Overview and Updates (as of January 2026)”, 102 categorical exclusions adopted from other agencies of which about nine are specific to communications uses. No deadline change.
    • Bureau of Reclamation — under “Changes”: new fee schedules, “Conforming to new NEPA standards”, and “Reduced staffing capacity may impact processing timelines”. That is the one in-window statement about federal-lands timeliness that runs the other way, and it belongs on the record.
    • National Park Service — 36 CFR part 14 right-of-way regulations “updated through rulemaking” to “add clarity about the NPS ROW Permitting process”, plus an application portal in pilot. Clarity and tooling, not deadlines.
    • Bureau of Indian Affairs — NPM-TRUS-48, which is the instrument now carrying this item.
  • USDA replaced its NEPA regulations in the window (interim final rule 2025-12326, 2025-07-03; final rule 2026-06537, 2026-04-03) and the National Park Service adopted categorical exclusions from other agencies including NTIA, BLM and the Forest Service (2025-10629, 2025-06-11). Neither is broadband-specific, and neither imposes a review deadline.
  • The route to the summit deck, for reuse. broadbandusa.ntia.gov/sitemap.xml does not list the event pages — grepping it for permit returns two URLs, one of them an unrelated award page. The permitting hub at /assistance/permitting is the index that actually links the summit materials, and the deck itself sits under /sites/default/files/YYYY-MM/, which the sitemap does not reach. Same shape as the state.gov uploads problem.
  • The object field was widened on 2026-09-06 from “Permitting reviews by the Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service” to the Quote’s own class, “agencies with jurisdiction over federal lands”. §3b’s mechanical tell reads the object field, so it has to say what the Quote says; the Quote’s “including the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service” is illustrative, not a closed list, and the narrower object would have made the BIA memorandum invisible to a later pass.
Action
restrict
Object
Timely permitting reviews and final actions by agencies with jurisdiction over federal lands
ID
2210