‘Leave it alone’: Amid BEAD review, state leaders plead for stability

March 10, 2025

A bevy of House Republicans lined up at a subcommittee hearing last week to bemoan the $42 billion Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment program, minutes after Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick announced he would conduct a “rigorous review” of the effort to close the digital divide.

Rep. Gus Bilirakis of Florida told the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Communications and Technology that BEAD’s “slow execution” means that connectivity is still a concern, and the “original hope in the program is turning to disappointment.” Rep. Buddy Carter of Georgia said former President Joe Biden’s administration had been “nothing short of a disaster for broadband deployment and expansion through America.”

Rep. Rick Allen of Georgia, the subcommittee’s vice-chair, lamented that BEAD is “full of unnecessary requirements” that has meant “not a single inch of fiber has been laid.” And Rep. Richard Hudson of North Carolina, who chairs the subcommittee, talked up his new legislation that he said would improve the program, and lamented BEAD’s “regulations unrelated to broadband to appease left-wing interest groups,” including “technology preferences, burdensome labor rules, and climate change requirements, to name a few.”

Many of those arguments looked to be rehashed from previous House hearings on BEAD, which was included in the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law. But proponents of the effort to close the digital divide said it takes on new urgency given Lutnick’s review and the apparent desire of some in President Donald Trump’s administration to at the very least rethink the program, or scrap it altogether.

“Let’s be honest, it seems to me that today’s hearing is about Republicans fishing for excuses to toss three years of work into the trash and undermining our efforts to connect every American,” said Rep. Doris Matsui, a California Democrat and the subcommittee’s ranking member, in her opening statement.