I have to wonder if there is any practical future for USDA’s ReConnect grants. I raise this question after noting that the Senate Appropriations Committee recently approved the fiscal year 2026 budget for the Department of Agriculture. Buried within that budget is $100 million dollars for new ReConnect loans or grants. It’s still early in the federal budget process, and the $100 million slated for next year is a preliminary number, but it’s already lower than previous annual allocations to the program.

ReConnect has been a popular program, particularly with cooperatives and small telcos. ReConnect was launched in December 2018 by Congress with an initial budget of $600 million. Additional funds continue to be allocated, including $550 million in 2020 and $1.15 billion in 2021. USDA is still sitting on $980 million of remaining appropriated funds, but is also sitting on $3 billion in funding requests.

ReConnect has always been an interesting program. USDA can use the funding for grants, loans, or a combination of the two. The program is intended to bring broadband to unserved rural locations, and the ReConnect process gives extra consideration to locations that are not close to any towns or cities.

I ask if ReConnect will still be relevant in upcoming years for several reasons. First, if you believe the hype about BEAD grants, every location in the country will soon be slated to get broadband of at least 100/20 Mbps. According to the NTIA, every location that has been excluded from BEAD is already served by at least one ISP claiming 100/20 Mbps. That can be for any technology, including fiber, cable, DSL, fixed wireless, FWA cellular wireless, or satellite.

But ignoring that promise from BEAD, there will still be remaining unserved locations around the country. For example, there have been some recent defaults of RDOF subsidies that were defaulted too late to be included in BEAD, and there will be more. There will likely be defaults on funding commitments from other state and federal grant programs, including some from the BEAD program. It’s also possible ISPs could go out of business and leave rural customers with no option at 100/20 Mbps. This is certainly possible for WISPs if the FCC meddles with the CBRS and 6 GHz spectrum.

I’m also positive that there are a lot of locations where ISPs claim 100/20 Mbps or faster in the FCC maps but are delivering something slower. Perhaps future ReConnect grants will allow ISPs to ask for funding in areas where they can prove the FCC map is wrong.

Another issue with ReConnect is that the grant rules in the past have insisted on contiguous grant areas of unserved locations. Because of the odd rules of many of the existing grant and subsidy programs, particularly RDOF, there will probably be no big contiguous unserved areas after BEAD grants have been awarded. Any future ReConnect grant is going to require cobbling together scattered locations into a single grant request, and that will require changes in the ReConnect rules.

But I think the fundamental challenge for BEAD is that the FCC is likely to declare soon that the rural broadband gap has been solved and every rural home in the country is able to buy adequate broadband. I’m not sure the USDA will be able to overcome that presumption.