Is LEO the “Benefit of the Bargain” for BEAD?

In March 2025, U.S. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick launched an effort to change key elements of the $42 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program, which Congress established in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021. Secretary Lutnick’s stated goal for the reforms is to get the “benefit of the bargain.” To accomplish this, Secretary Lutnick reportedly plans to shift BEAD away from the deployment of fiber networks, which can be expensive, and toward the deployment of low-earth orbit (LEO) satellite networks, which can be relatively cheap. But who, exactly, stands to benefit from this bargain? And is LEO really the bargain that Secretary Lutnick seems to think it is?