Brookings Fellow Blair Levin thinks BEAD is being handled better than RDOF

Blair Levin, non-resident senior fellow with The Brookings Institution, has some opinions about the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) program. He thinks it’s being run a lot better than the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF). Levin recently testified at a House subcommittee hearing where Republican Congresspeople tried to slam the BEAD program. He contrasted BEAD with the RDOF program, which set up a reverse auction to award broadband grants under the former Republican Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai. Levin said, “RDOF was a disaster.” Why? He noted the auction was rushed, using “a crappy map,” so that then-President Trump could brag about broadband deployment under his watch. But Congress, during the Biden Administration, decided that for BEAD, the FCC needed to get the U.S. broadband map in decent shape before money was granted. And that’s caused the biggest delay in the program. So, while the process of cleaning up the FCC’s broadband map has taken quite a bit of time since the BEAD program began, it was worth the effort, according to Levin.