Last week, President Trump called for the end of the $2.75 billion in grants from the Digital Equity Act. The funding was approved as part of the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment (BEAD) program.

The purpose of the program was to help close the broadband adoption gap by helping people learn how to use computers and to navigate the Internet. The grants were to be distributed in two ways. The State Digital Equity Capacity Grant Program reserved $1.44 for States to distribute through grants. The NTIA was slow in getting this program running, and grants were supposed to be launched starting in 2022. The NTIA finally announced $840 million in funding for States in 2024. It doesn’t appear that very much of this funding has been turned into grant awards.

The second part of the program was for the Digital Equity Competitive Grant Program that is administered directly by NTIA. The budget for this grant program was $1.25 billion, with 5% reserved for Native Entities, and 1% set aside for territories. The program was supposed to award $250 million per year in grants from 2022 until 2026. The NTIA was also slow in launching this program, but finally announced $619 in awards in January of this year. It seems certain that those awards will never get inked. There has been money awarded to states, but it’s not clear how much of that might have actually flowed to states since this seems to be a reimbursement grant program.

It’s a shame that almost none of this money has already been used. If NTIA had met the Congressional time line and intentions, 60% of the grants would already have been awarded in 2022, 2023 and 2024. The NTIA has defended the slow speed of the BEAD grant program, but Congress clearly intended for this money to flow quickly. I’m sure we’ll hear about how hard it was to make this work, but I have to think States would have been able to give their portion of this away if they had been given the money years ago. I remember a lot of non-profits that were already making plans to ask for this grant funding in 2021.

It’s hard to deny that there is a computer literacy gap in the country. I can’t find a specific definition of computer literacy, and different sources estimate the number of adults who are not computer literate between 30 million and 50 million. This program was part of the BEAD process that wanted to make sure that rural folks who don’t know how to use computers can take advantage of the expansion of rural broadband that is supposed to be coming from BEAD. The industry is still waiting to find out the status of the $42.5 billion in broadband grants, and seeing this program and ReConnect grants killed in the same week isn’t give anybody a warm and fuzzy feeling.

The President’s announcement said this funding is illegal, which is an odd stance since this was approved by Congress, which seems to be the very definition of legal. This cancellation announcement was not unexpected due move to kill all federal programs and activities that are considered to be DEI. It’s not clear how this is a DEI program other than the name of the grant program contains the word equity.

There is a lot of controversy surrounding the White House’s ability to kill grant programs that were created by Congress, and there are already a slew of lawsuits concerning other federal grants that have been cancelled or put on hold. A quick web search shows lawsuits associated with cancelled grants for the National Endowment for the Humanities, USAID, NIH research grants,  Covid-19 public health grants, and others.

There is always the chance that Congress will insist that these grants proceed, but recent lack of Congressional action probably means there is little chance of that.