Brief BEAD Rewired: What the Changes to the Broadband Program Mean for States

In 2021, Congress passed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), which included $42 billion to increase access to high-speed internet called the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) program. The program provides grants to eligible entities that include all states, Washington, D.C., and the territories for broadband planning, mapping and deployment efforts. It is administered by the National Telecommunication and Information Administration (NTIA) within the Department of Commerce.

In March 2025, U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick announced a "rigorous review" of BEAD, signaling possible changes to states. Working with the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society, State Connections, a bipartisan working group of over 140 state legislators submitted a letter to Secretary Lutnick requesting that any BEAD changes be optional rather than mandatory. "State BEAD and Digital Equity programs have been designed by and for state stakeholders, and they are poised to bring high-speed, reliable, affordable, and scalable broadband to virtually every last one of our constituents," the letter argued that "at this late stage, major changes would undermine our work and delay deployment by years." Bipartisan members of Congress and some industry stakeholders expressed concern regarding possible changes. Adding to these concerns, the Department of Commerce also announced the termination of the Digital Equity Act grants in May.

After President Trump declared that he was terminating the Digital Equity Act in early May, the Department of Commerce issued a policy notice with updated guidance for the program in June. The notice requires all states and territories, including Louisiana, Nevada and Delaware which had already had their final proposals approved, to re-conduct their subgrant programs for every BEAD-eligible location within 90 days to ensure a Benefit of the Bargain bidding application round occurs.

Technological Neutrality

The new policy notice alters the original Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO)'s limitation on the definition of priority broadband projects, which are required by IIJA to be given priority by states and territories Through statute, the IIJA defined a priority broadband project as "a project designed to:

1. Provide broadband service that meets speed, latency, reliability, consistency in quality of service, and related criteria as the assistant secretary shall determine.
2. Ensure that the network built by the project can easily scale speeds over time to:
3. Meet the evolving connectivity needs of households and businesses.
4. Support the deployment of 5G, successor wireless technologies, and other advanced services." Consistent with the FCC, NTIA determined that broadband services must meet the statutory minimum speeds of 100/20 Mbps and latency less than or equal to 100 milliseconds.

The original NOFO, published in May 2022, defined priority broadband projects as being exclusively applicable to fiber networks. The new policy notice removes that requirement. The revised definition of priority broadband eliminates distinctions between fiber, hybrid-fiber coaxial, digital subscriber line, fixed wireless or low earth orbit satellite technology, so long as the technology being used satisfies the listed requirements such as speed and latency. Applicants must provide supporting documentation so states and territories can determine whether the proposed technology meets the standards, but states cannot use the type of technology as a reason to deny the project priority broadband status. Whether or not a project satisfies the statutory conditions for being a priority broadband project is still determined by the state or territory, although NTIA reserves the right to reverse that determination if deemed unreasonable.

Scoring Criteria

The scoring criteria have also been revised to favor the lowest-cost bidder as the primary criteria for selection, where the previous NOFO included other criteria such as affordability and fair labor practices. According to the policy notice, the lowest-cost bidder may be a proposal that is not the lowest-cost option for a given set of broadband serviceable locations but is part of the combination of selected projects with the lowest overall cost to the BEAD Program. When assessing competing proposals from Internet Service Providers (ISPs) states and territories must assess the total funding required to complete the project and the total cost per location. If competing proposals are within 15% of the lowest cost proposal for the same project area, the eligible entity can evaluate deployment speed, network speed, latency and other technical capabilities and whether the subgrantee was already selected preliminarily, as secondary criteria. To see an example of how this changes the scoring criteria in a given state or territory, Alabama has updated its criteria to reflect post-review changes to BEAD, compared with their previous criteria.

Other scoring criteria from the previous NOFO have been eliminated, including local coordination and stakeholder engagement, which many states had previously included in their proposals. The previous NOFO required states and territories to coordinate with organizations including political subdivisions, tribal governments, local and community-based organizations, and unions and other worker organizations to ensure full representation and inclusion of unserved, underserved, and underrepresented communities throughout the planning and deployment processes. Instead, the new policy says that states and territories can satisfy the statutory requirements on local coordination by certifying that it completed the standard public comment process in the application stages.

Possible Implications for States

This policy change has several possible implications for states. One is whether the shift to technological neutrality and lowest-cost projects could shift a significant portion of grants from fiber to other technologies like unlicensed fixed wireless and low-earth orbit satellites. While some industry representatives hailed the changes, a former senior official from the FCC recently made the argument that states still retain some flexibility to prioritize high-performing, scalable broadband projects, and that the assessments states will conduct will still find substantial benefits to fiber projects.

Another implication for states is whether BEAD deployment will be delayed, and for how long, if states and territories or NTIA struggle to meet these tight timelines. After the changes to BEAD were announced, Andrew Butcher, president of the Maine Connectivity Authority, stressed that the state was working to adapt to the policy guidance as quickly as possible.

Although the changes outlined in NTIA's new policy notice may create additional challenges, states remain committed to broadband deployment.