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..."