One of the things that mystifies me this year is how many federal elected officials have disappeared in terms of supporting broadband. For example, there has been little talk of elected officials openly trying to stop NTIA from gutting the BEAD grant program. There’s no news about trying to force NTIA to go ahead and award grants from the Digital Equity Act. This may be happening behind the scenes, but there’s no big public news about supporting better broadband.

This is not intended as a political blog. I am truly puzzled by this big change. I fully understand that politics in DC is a mess right now. But the sudden indifference to broadband is a huge shift from just the recent past. Broadband has always been one of the few topics that has had bipartisan support from rural legislators, because they all knew that this was important to their constituents. Over the last five or ten years, I’ve heard from dozens of County governments who have said that the lack of good broadband was the number one issue for their constituents.

That message has always carried upward to federal legislators, particularly in the House of Representatives. Over the years, I’ve talked to a number of House members, or their staffs, who wanted to know more about the broadband market in their district. I can’t think of an ISP preparing to ask for a broadband grant that was unable to get a letter of support from their House member. And House members always turn up for ribbon cuttings for the launch of a new broadband network. Getting better broadband in rural communities has always been big local news, and elected officials have always participated in trying to get better broadband and celebrating it when it shows up.

The most visible political support for better broadband has come at the County level, and I know many County governments are confused and dismayed by the sudden retraction of the BEAD grant program. A lot of County Boards put a lot of effort into the BEAD process, because BEAD grant scoring rules in a lot of states rewarded ISPs that got real commitments from local politicians instead of the more common generic letter of support. County Boards were led to believe that they had some say in choosing the ISPs they wanted, since BEAD scoring gave extra points for such effort. A lot of County Boards even made tentative grant awards as matching for BEAD using local or ARPA funds, because that supported the local ISP they favored. Unfortunately, the sudden push to award BEAD to the lowest bidder means a lot of those local grants will go unused, and the ARPA funds will evaporate.

One of the most perplexing aspects of cutting BEAD funding is that the federal government is making a massive push for AI. Bringing AI into everyday life can only happen if everybody has access to good broadband. I’m truly perplexed how the government and the tech companies that are supporting them are for AI but not for spending the BEAD funding that is already in the pipeline.

A good compromise to support AI would be to let States have some or all of the non-deployment funds. It looks like that is going to be roughly half of the $45 billion allocated to BEAD. States could do a lot with that money if they were free to use it in ways they choose. It might make sense at this point to redistribute the non-deployment funds – the allocation of BEAD funds to States was based on faulty FCC maps and clearly gave some States too much money, and others not enough.

Lack of any vocal bipartisanship for broadband probably also doesn’t bode well for other needed legislation, like reforming the Universal Fund. I’m not hopeful that much will change with the BEAD funding or USF reform unless federal politicians speak up and remind NTIA and the administration that good broadband is essential for the American economy and a future that includes AI.