The Sudden Mad Rush of BEAD

From an internet service provider perspective, the BEAD grant program has progressed at a glacial scale. The BEAD grants were signed into law on November 15, 2021, as part of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. Folks in the industry assumed that BEAD would follow a timeline similar to the earlier grants that were awarded using federal CARES and ARPA funding, and vendors certainly thought that grant awards would start in 2023 with construction underway by 2024. And then nothing happened. The BEAD process got bogged down in paperwork and bureaucracy. The NTIA required states to write extensive grant and policy manuals which were never required for earlier state grant programs. The paperwork process for states has been numbing. So here we sit 28 months after the announcement of the grant program and no grant money has flowed to states. After the delays and endless paperwork, States will now be under tremendous pressure to award the grants and quickly shove the money out the door. This will lead to big mistakes and bad grant awards—the exact things the process was designed to try to avoid.