*The following story was originally published here by Broadband Breakfast.

Tribal broadband is not simply a faster connection. For tribal nations, panelists said Wednesday, durable infrastructure can preserve language, extend health care and education, support economic development and strengthen sovereignty, but only when tribes control the choices shaping their networks.

That connection between culture and infrastructure emerged during a Broadband Breakfast Live Online discussion on tribal broadband and adoption. 

The conversation ranged from fiber and satellites to open-access networks, spectrum rights, data sovereignty and the cost of helping residents get online.

“We want our members to learn the language. We want other people to learn the language,” said Rob Griffin, tribal broadband director for the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. “But to do so, we have to have good infrastructure.”

The Choctaw Nation began pursuing fiber after encountering a school limited to satellite internet, Griffin said. It has since received $110 million in grants and is building 1,000 miles of fiber alongside fixed wireless connections. Such networks can support language programs, remote work, testing and telehealth for decades.

Infrastructure and sovereignty

Federal investment has helped accelerate tribal deployments. Christopher Mitchell, director of the Community Broadband Networks initiative at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (and co-founder of the Tribal Broadband Bootcamp), said his organization is tracking about 190 tribal networks, including roughly 100 already operating. (Check out ILSR's in-depth Tribal networks tracker and interactive map here).

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 Texas Broadband Development Office (BDO) says that it has placed Broadband, Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) broadband grant money on hold to address continued claims that the program has been unfairly tilted to the direct benefit of billionaire Elon Musk.

In July, the office faced widespread accusations that Trump administration changes made to the BEAD program deprioritized faster fiber technologies and gave an unfair advantage to Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and their slower, more congested low-Earth-orbit (LEO) satellite technologies.

The changes were part of the Trump administration’s misleadingly-named “benefit of the bargain” modifications, which eliminated requirements that taxpayer-funded broadband be affordable to the public, removed efforts to ensure equitable broadband delivery, and doled out billions to Musk and Bezos for satellite service they’d already planned to deploy.

An email obtained by the Texas Tribune sent from the state broadband office to subgrantees says that a hold is being placed on all BEAD disbursements “until further notice.”

“No further action is required from subgrantees at this time,” the office said in the email. “The BDO will provide additional guidance and updates as they become available.”

The email does not provide a reason for the hold, and the Texas Broadband Office did not respond to a request for comment. But the hold comes just a week after Texas Comptroller Don Huffines announced a comprehensive internal review of his office, including the state broadband office, in part to address complaints of Musk favoritism.

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.

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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..."