New NTIA Administrator Alan Davidson Already Has a Lot on His Plate

The Senate has confirmed Alan Davidson as the new National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) administrator, and Davidson will need to hit the ground running as NTIA is responsible for the lion’s share of the $65 billion allotted for broadband in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. The broadband deployment programs for which NTIA is responsible include the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) program, the Tribal program and the Middle-Mile program. The BEAD has a budget of $42.5 billion and the other programs add $6 billion to that. In addition, NTIA will be responsible for the State Digital Equity Capacity Grant and the Digital Equity Competitive Grant adoption programs. Combined, those programs have a budget of $2.75 billion. Add up the budgets of all the NTIA broadband programs and it comes to over $50 billion. And while individual states will be responsible for awarding a large part of the funding, NTIA is ultimately responsible for all that money. With so much funding at stake, there undoubtedly will be plenty of disputes over who gets what and why. Already we’re hearing that some states are gearing up to protest the amount allotted to them in the BEAD program. We’re also likely to see disputes over what criteria should be used to award BEAD and other funding.