A recent Government Accountability Office (GAO) report reveals what’s been obvious to broadband deployment experts for years now: the federal government’s multi-agency approach to closing the digital divide is undermined by a lack of coordination and data-management among agencies.

The result is an FCC broadband coverage map with an amalgamation of inaccuracies that misrepresents where high-speed Internet service does or does not exist, a flaw that can steer taxpayer dollars away from communities that actually need them.

Since 2020, four federal agencies — the FCC, NTIA, USDA and Treasury — have been administering nine different grant programs to build-out new Internet networks in unserved and underserved areas across the nation, including the $42.5 billion federal flagship BEAD (Broadband Equity Access and Deployment) program.

As ILSR’s Senior GIS Analyst Christine Parker notes, the report devotes considerable attention to “de-duplication” — the process of cross-referencing which locations have already received funding or service commitments from one program so that other programs don't waste money doubling up, or worse, leave locations out entirely because it was wrongly assumed to be covered elsewhere.

Image

“But there’s no documented process or timeline for actually doing this,” Parker says.

Garbage In, Garbage Out

Part of the problem, the report notes, is that agencies track and report funding data in different formats, with some programs collecting far more granular location-level detail than others so that it is much harder to reconcile the datasets and match them up. GAO indicates the agencies are aware of the issue and are working to reconcile it, but as of the report’s release, no consistent process was in place.

Researchers say they’re concerned that a massive influx of new federal grant money being redirected to Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite broadband company in Ohio will be thwarted by the simple fact that many targeted locations don’t have a clear, unobstructed view of the sky.

Tom Reid of Reid Consulting conducted a study earlier this year taking a closer look at the 30,000 locations in Ohio that are poised to receive subsidized service from Starlink, and found that as many as 70 percent of the target locations were covered by tree canopy preventing the minimum 110-degree field of view Starlink dishes require.

“Only about 30 percent of the households awarded in the state of Ohio have a clear enough view of the sky to get a good, stable Starlink signal,” Reid recently told local Ohio public media.

Ohio is slated to receive $793 million in federal Broadband, Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) grants to fund fiber expansion. But after the Trump NTIA last year changed the program to benefit Elon Musk, Starlink quickly became the biggest state beneficiary of public tax money, receiving more than $51.6 million in grants.

The Trump administration’s changes not only eliminated affordability and equitable deployment requirements, they directed millions of dollars away from higher-capacity future-proof fiber, and toward the back pocket of a billionaire who had already planned to deploy the LEO satellite network without subsidization.

The Hoopa Valley Tribe is celebrating the opening of its new fiber network operations center as the Hoopa Valley Public Utilities District (HVPUD) expands fiber-to-the-home Internet service throughout the Hoopa Valley Reservation and into neighboring communities just outside of its Tribal lands.

To mark the occasion earlier this summer, more than 50 community members, Tribal leaders, HVPUD staff, and project partners attended the July 17 opening celebration.

At the celebration, Hoopa Valley Tribal Vice Chairman Jordan Hailey hailed the milestone moment:

“This is truly a great day for the Hoopa Valley Tribe, for the department and for the Hoopa people. It makes me proud as a Hoopa Tribal member and a member of this community to see everything that they’ve accomplished.”

Though the new network operations headquarters is a storage and transport data center, General Manager of HVPUD Linnea Jackson made it clear that it is not a hyperscale/compute AI data center that have sparked controversy and protest in numerous local communities across the nation.

“The (data centers) that are sucking up all those resources — water, land, and energy — those are the AI data centers. Ours is a network hub, not a huge footprint,” Jackson tells ILSR. “We’re talking about servers and rack space for (Tribal) government operations and records, not a demand on our water resources — completely different from a large AI data center.”

Image

Establishing Data Sovereignty

Rural cooperatives have been the backbone of modern efforts to bring affordable next-generation fiber to long-neglected rural U.S. communities. 

So it’s important to listen to them when they warn that Trump administration NTIA changes to U.S. telecom subsidy programs are going to have a profoundly-negative impact on efforts to expand fast, affordable Internet access.

Earlier this month rural electric and broadband cooperatives gathered in Washington, DC, for the 5th annual Broadband Leadership Summit. 

The topic du jour was broadly unpopular changes made by the NTIA to the Broadband, Equity, Deployment, and Access program (BEAD) created by the 2021 infrastructure bill.

As ILSR has repeatedly explored, NTIA BEAD changes reduced oversight of deployment, lowered quality standards, stripped away requirements that the resulting taxpayer Internet access be affordable and equitably deployed, and redirected billions of dollars away from affordable fiber to the low-Earth orbit space ambitions of billionaires Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.

That’s not sitting well with the cooperatives doing the heavy and costly lifting to bring affordable access into long-neglected rural communities.

Lawmakers are pushing the Trump administration to stop being murky on whether states will be able to access tens of billions in “non-deployment funds” mandated by Congress that have been temporarily hijacked by the administration’s unpopular changes to a once-in-a-lifetime federal grant program to expand high-speed Internet access.

Representative April McClain Delaney (D-MD) is the latest politician to send a letter to the Trump NTIA asking for competent guidance on what will happen to the estimated $21 billion in “non deployment funds” suddenly stuck in limbo.

“States cannot build a workforce without workforce development funding; they cannot ensure safe adoption without digital safety education; they cannot support vulnerable populations without telehealth and remote-learning infrastructure; and they cannot protect critical networks without robust cybersecurity capacity,” Delaney and three other lawmakers wrote.

Image

A year ago the Trump administration made numerous controversial changes to the $42.5 billion Broadband, Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program included in the 2021 infrastructure bill. That included removing rules ensuring that the resulting taxpayer-funded Internet access would be equitably deployed and affordable.

Today, The Verge published an in-depth piece – “Elon Musk and the plot to hijack America’s broadband” – authored by our own Sean Gonsalves and ILSR contributor Karl Bode that examines the BEAD program from its inception to where it is now.

The piece details how the once-in-a-generation federal initiative to solve America’s digital divide has devolved into “a flaming mess.”

Here's a few excerpts:

"At 9PM ET on the night of May 28th, a Blue Origin New Glenn rocket sat on the launchpad at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The craft was in the middle of a hot-fire test awaiting the arrival of Amazon Leo satellites, the first of 24 batches to be shuttled into low Earth orbit for an ambitious satellite internet venture. The effort was backed by hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars, leveraging a Biden-era law meant to address America’s digital divide."

"But before the satellites even reached the launch site, Jeff Bezos’ rocket exploded into a massive fireball, its wreckage left smoldering on the ground. It was an unintentionally perfect metaphor for a once-in-a-generation attempt to fix the creaky US broadband system, now a flaming mess melting into a slush fund for billionaires."

"Bezos — along with newly minted trillionaire Elon Musk — has become one of the biggest beneficiaries of Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD), a $42.45 billion broadband expansion program passed as part of President Joe Biden’s 2021 “Build Back Better” initiative. BEAD was intended to give long-underserved communities billions of dollars for high-quality, future-proof fiber networks."

"But under President Donald Trump and a coalition of MAGA-allied tech moguls, Build Back Better has been transformed into 'tear down quickly,' leaving states mired in bureaucracy and delays. Five years later, only a handful of the millions of Americans slated for an internet access upgrade actually got one, and there’s little accountability in sight..."

Trump Federal Communication Commission Chairman Brendan Carr has announced vague potential changes to the FCC’s E-Rate program that could harm program funding, effectiveness, and the overarching goal of bringing affordable Internet access to long-neglected schools and rural communities trapped on the wrong side of the digital divide.

The reforms come as Carr also looks to make changes to the FCC’s broadband mapping efforts, something consumer groups say could harm the government’s ability to measure which communities need improved, affordable access, or suffer from a pronounced lack of broadband competition.

In an announcement to the FCC website, Carr stated the 30-year-old bipartisan E-Rate program, which costs $3 billion annually, was in dire need of reforms. The program is primarily funded by a small surcharge affixed to phone lines. With the steady erosion of copper-based phone lines, debates have arisen about how to best sustain the program.

But instead of focusing on issues like subsidy fraud by large telecoms, Carr’s announcement oddly focuses heavily on concerns about student “screen time” and what content students are allowed to view. It’s a problematic foray for an FCC boss recently under fire for unconstitutional censorship efforts targeting comedians and journalists.

In the marathon to bring universal high-speed Internet service to the most rural state in the nation, Vermont is heading into the last-mile stretch of the race with the finish line in sight.

In February, the Vermont Community Broadband Board (VCBB) announced that the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) overseeing the federal Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program, had approved Vermont’s Final Proposal, unlocking $93 million of the state's nearly $229 million federal allocation.

After years of painstaking planning, public input, and navigating bureaucratic hurdles, it marked a pivotal moment – with the state's selected grant recipients cleared to begin deploying mostly fiber to the communities that have long been waiting for high-speed connectivity after decades of neglect from the Big Cable and Telecom providers.

“This is a major milestone for many of our rural towns and a once-in-a-generation opportunity to strengthen and revitalize communities,” Gov. Phil Scott said in a statement, crediting NTIA, Vermont's congressional delegation, and the VCBB for shepherding the state's plan.

Image

U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, never one to mince words, spoke to both the significance and the frustration of the moment. “Affordable, high-speed [I]nternet is a vitally important resource in every corner of the country. It is foundational to modern life,” he said.