You probably didn’t hear much talk about internet policy in political commercials or on debate stages this year. But the results of the 2024 election will have a reverberating impact on the state of the internet that could be felt for decades.
“The good news about broadband policy is that it's fairly bipartisan,” Blair Levin, a former chief of staff at the Federal Communications Commission and a telecom industry analyst at New Street Research, told CNET. “You'll very rarely find any individual politician, whether Democrat or Republican, arguing against the benefits that you get from broadband.”
While politicians might be in agreement that high-speed internet is a necessity in 2024, they have different ideas about how to get there and what’s best for the people who use it.
One of the biggest questions in broadband circles right now is what will happen to the $42.5 billion Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment Program, which was passed in 2021 to grow broadband infrastructure across the country. It was the largest single investment the federal government’s ever made in expanding internet access.
“I can’t tell you how many broadband plans for Michigan I’ve written over the last 13 or 14 years,” Eric Frederick, chief connectivity officer for the state of Michigan, said in a recent interview. “It’s a lot. But we’ve never had an opportunity like we have with BEAD to drive what we’re going to do with it.”
To gauge what might change in the coming months under a Trump administration, I polled a dozen industry insiders about how the BEAD program could be impacted. Here’s what they had to say.
Republicans may attempt to speed up BEAD rollout
Republicans would either clear away bureaucratic red tape on the largest broadband infrastructure investment or meddle with a massively complex project that’s already well under way. It depends on who you ask.
Three years after it was passed as part of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, Republicans have been extremely critical of the pace of BEAD’s rollout, as well as its mandate for low-cost plans.
In a Wall Street Journal op-ed published in mid-October, Republican FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr slammed BEAD for its “diversity, equity and inclusion requirements, climate-change rules, price controls, preferences for union labor, and schemes that favor government-run networks.”
We're talking about a multi-billion dollar program that a lot of people have spent countless hours on. So turning a ship like that isn't going to be easy.
President of the Digital Progress Institute
Former Senate Commerce Chairman Roger Wicker predicted that a second Trump administration will “be in a much better position to remove these extraneous constraints” on BEAD that the National Telecommunications and Information Administration “added without statutory authorization.” Sen. Ted Cruz also added that Republicans would “consider every option” to address BEAD’s shortcomings if they win a majority in Congress.
Cruz hasn’t outlined specific steps for how he would do this, but last year, he called on states to return unused BEAD money if they already have sufficient funding from other federal broadband programs.
But at this point, the cat may be out of the bag when it comes to making changes to BEAD.
Speaking in a recent podcast, Alan Davidson, who heads the NTIA, the organization responsible for overseeing BEAD, dismissed Republicans’ criticism as “election year politics.”
We're pretty far along in these programs. In many…the funds have been spent.
Alan Davidson, Administrator, National Telecommunications and Information Administration
“I'm not that concerned about the future of this program,” Davidson said. “I'm optimistic that it will continue in this form because it's the right way to do it. It's the right answer for making sure that everybody in America gets connected.”
There may be only so much Republicans can do at this point to speed up the process. Frederick said BEAD’s existing timeline may already be too rushed.
“The timing issue that I see is the actual construction of these projects,” Frederick said. “We have shortened construction seasons -- the [Michigan] weather does not help any when it comes to building. [Having only] four years to build all these projects is going to be rough.”
BEAD has prioritized expanding fiber internet to rural areas.
picture alliance / Getty ImagesTrump could shake up the NTIA -- the organization administering BEAD funding
Still, experts I spoke with suggested that BEAD projects could also be in jeopardy because of changes to the NTIA. One source who spoke on condition of anonymity said they’d expect the NTIA to be massively downsized with a Republican victory.
In the Project 2025 blueprint, former President Donald Trump's former Department of Commerce chief financial officer, Thomas F. Gilman, described the NTIA as suffering from “organizational malaise” and requiring “energetic leadership by political appointees.”
If we see a gutting of the NTIA, we're also going to be seeing more delays. By law, every state has to run their award applicants through the NTIA. That's going to take a lot of time.
Christopher Ali, professor of telecommunications at Penn State University
This echoes an executive order made by Trump late in his presidency known as Schedule F, which stripped federal employees of protections and allowed them to be fired for political reasons. Schedule F was canceled in the early days of the Biden presidency but could be reinstated with a Trump win. That could have a huge impact on the NTIA -- and by extension, BEAD.
“If Trump does what he has said about Schedule F and you replace lots of civil servants with a lot of political loyalists, there could be enormous delays in the BEAD projects because a lot of the people actually administering it at the NTIA are civil servants,” Levin explained.