The Bad Business of BEAD

The 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) provides $42.45 billion in grant funding to states via the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment Program (BEAD). IIJA also underscores that any state receiving these funds may not exclude local governments from applying to use these funds to build their own broadband networks. Yet, 17 states have laws that do exactly this. With tens of billions of dollars about to be disbursed, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA)—the government agency tasked with overseeing BEAD—continues to ignore a looming legal quandary that could mire the program in lawsuits. This legal paradox is not subtle. The IIJA is quite explicit: states may not exclude local governments from eligibility for BEAD funding. NTIA has ignored this looming problem for more than two years but is now out of time. And if NTIA does not reconcile this grant eligibility issue, it will be guilty of allocating billions of dollars in federal funding in violation of federal statute. 

[Christopher Ali is the Pioneers Chair in Telecommunications and Professor of Telecommunications in the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications at Penn State University. David Elliot Berman is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Media, Inequality & Change Center at the University of Pennsylvania studying media policy and journalism. Sydney L. Forde is a PhD candidate in the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications at Penn State University. Her work focuses on the political economy of communications and media industries, media policy, and critical theory.  Sascha Meinrath is the Palmer Chair in Telecommunications in the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications at Penn State University and the director of X-Lab. Victor Pickard is the C. Edwin Baker Professor of Media Policy and Political Economy and Co-Director of the Media, Inequality & Change Center at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.]