A Tale of Two Grant Programs

Pretty much everybody in the industry agrees that the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) grant process has taken too long. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act legislation that authorized BEAD was signed into law in November 2021. A few states are now opening a grant portal to accept BEAD grant applications—nearly three years after the legislation was passed. Not all grant programs have taken this long. An interesting contrast to BEAD is another huge-dollar federal grant program, the Capital Project Fund (CPF). That was a $10 billion broadband grant program that was part of legislation for the American Rescue Plan that was enacted in March 2021. The two grant programs have a few things in common. Both are to build broadband infrastructure in unserved and underserved areas. Both grant programs give federal money to States to choose grant winners. But there is a stark difference in the way the two programs have been operated; the biggest difference between the two grant programs is that Treasury fully trusted States to make grant awards within some rule boundaries, while NTIA micromanaged the process from beginning to end.