By Stephen Smoot
In 2023, United States Senator Joe Manchin made an announcement that seemed, at the time, game changing for West Virginians who still had no access to high speed internet.
“This is a historic announcement for the Mountain State and will benefit every West Virginian. . . . Today (we are) announcing more than $1.2 billion to finally ensure every home in West Virginia is connected to reliable broadband.”
When BEAD first rolled out, some concerns were shared by local West Virginia officials about the potentially prohibitive match requirement. That, however, turned out to be one of the less significant problems with it.
Called “Broadband Equity Access and Deployment,” the program came out of President Joe Biden’s signature Inflation Reduction Act. A release by the Senator’s office gave Manchin significant credit for crafting it, stating Senator Manchin “created the $42.45 billion BEAD program within the NTIA. Senator Manchin authored the provision that allocates funding to each state based on its proportion of unserved areas in the updated FCC broadband coverage map, as well as additional funding for high-cost areas like West Virginia that are more difficult to serve.”
Three years later, as President Donald Trump took office, not a single broadband service network had been constructed through BEAD.
Michael Santorelli, director of the Advanced Communications Law and Policy Institute at New York Law School, penned an opinion piece last February for the online trade publication Broadband Breakfast.
He placed the blame squarely on the former president’s administration, calling it “the direct result of excessive bureaucracy, regulatory overreach, and a misguided approach by the Biden administration, which prioritized its political agenda and program micromanagement over connecting people to broadband.”
Santorelli went on to explain that “rather than adhere to the law’s straightforward and laudable goal of working with states to get money into the hands of ISPs to build broadband in areas that need it, the Biden NTIA larded the program with rules and restrictions that slowed deployment to a crawl.”
One of the issues faced came in the form of the Biden Administration’s insistence on price controls. The law establishes the requirement for a “low cost option.” Santorelli describes how the law with one hand seems to provide states latitude to find that level within their own market. With the other hand, the federal government also states that it can deny the state proposed low cost rate and strongly encourages adopting a $30 per month price.
He added that “NTIA could withhold approval of a state’s Initial Proposal – and thus delay or cancel a state’s BEAD program – if the state does not accede to NTIA’s preferred approach to any issue.” As of 2024, the Commonwealth of Virginia had yet to see its proposal accepted, even after several revisions. Santorelli stated that the sticking point seemed to be where they set their low cost option price.
In a move that critics have called “everything bagelism,” the Biden Administration loaded its social welfare and other agenda points into the program as well. Santorelli described them as a “slew of requirements involving environmental reviews, climate resilience, prevailing wages, and labor mandates to grant awards. Few of these requirements have any basis in the BEAD statute and have made many ISPs think twice about seeking funding.”
In other words, every added hoop through which to jump convinces many internet service providers that seeking the funding is not worth it to them.
Santorelli suggests a number of reforms that the Trump Administration could pass that would help BEAD to fulfill its mission much more effectively. He states that funding should go to experienced broadband providers with established ISPs.
Additionally, since rural areas typically struggle to give profitable returns, Santorelli states that public-private partnerships have seen the most success. One of the models that attracted much attention nationally several years ago was the partnership set between the Hampshire County Commission and Hardy Telecommunications. Hampshire County gets the funding to build out the infrastructure and Hardy Telecommunications provides service and maintains the system.
BEAD has fierce critics from all political camps. Ezra Klein, New York Times columnist, went on the Jon Stewart Show to share the bewildering 14 step (with numerous points and sub-steps within each step) process that states must follow should they wish to participate.
At one point, Klein stated that states could apply for up to $5 million in planning grants.
“Planning grants?” asked a bewildered Stewart.
“Planning grants,” Klein confirmed.
Klein had appeared on Stewart’s show to promote a book he co-authored with Derek Thomson called Abundance. Its thesis lies in showing how the federal government prioritizes the proper process over getting results – in essence a critique of modern liberal-left governance as a whole.
Tim Stelzig, who administered the program for the Biden Administration through the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) fired back. He called the interview “a comedic bit” that “sounded like a Byzantine regulatory process churning away for years without delivering promised results.” He also bemoaned how Klein and others do not prioritize what he called “progressive” elements in the process.
In a subsequent article, Stelzig explained that “many states and territories had never been involved in broadband infrastructure grant funding and thus in 2021 and 2022 lacked the experience required to achieve good outcomes. Many did not even have an office nominally charged with such expertise. The fundamental structure of the BEAD program thus necessitated giving states and territories time to establish such offices, irrespective of other timing goals.”
He explained that BEAD’s structure resulted in this because the law took a federal approach and allowed states flexibility. That said, the law also seemed to give that flexibility to meet very difficult mandates and guidelines. Also, the example of the continued rejection of proposals from Virginia seems to call the actual level of flexibility into question.
He continually emphasizes that this came out of bipartisan agreement, but that would stretch (as the term often is stretched by both sides) the meaning of “bipartisan” quite a bit.
No explanation came of why the federal government created a $42 billion program that necessitated the existence of non-existent state government agencies. Nor did he make reference to how much these new entities would cost state governments in the long term.
Stelzig also blamed delays on the Federal Communications Commission mapping process taking longer than expected, without mentioning that the problem was the FCC’s own. That agency’s maps played a key role in identifying underserved areas.
Stelzig did not specify who caused the delay but it came, at least in part, from the maps’ serious inaccuracies. Manchin stated in a release that he was “the only Member of Congress to formally challenge the FCC coverage maps and prove them wrong.”
