- Republicans have been attempting to slam the BEAD program
- But Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Blair Levin said that’s rich after the Republicans’ own disaster with the RDOF program
- Levin will be kicking off Fierce Networks’ Broadband Nation Expo in October
Blair Levin, non-resident senior fellow with The Brookings Institution, will be kicking off the pre-event workshop at Fierce Network’s Broadband Nation Expo on October 9, and he has some opinions about the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) program. He thinks it’s being run a lot better than the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF).
Levin recently testified at a House subcommittee hearing where Republican Congresspeople tried to slam the BEAD program. Fierce Network asked Levin why Republicans would be trying to undermine BEAD, which has already become law with bi-partisan support.
Levin said, “It is obviously a use of government resources to assist in a campaign,” alluding to the upcoming U.S. elections in November.
He contrasted BEAD with the RDOF program, which set up a reverse auction to award broadband grants under the former Republican FCC Chairman Ajit Pai. Levin said, “RDOF was a disaster.”
Why? He noted the auction was rushed, using “a crappy map,” so that then-President Trump could brag about broadband deployment under his watch.
But Congress, during the Biden Administration, decided that for BEAD, the FCC needed to get the U.S. broadband map in decent shape before money was granted. And that’s caused the biggest delay in the program.
“Congress was right to do that because of how much they screwed up RDOF,” said Levin.
So, while the process of cleaning up the FCC’s broadband map has taken quite a bit of time since the BEAD program began, it was worth the effort, according to Levin.
Price regulation
Another topic that Levin might touch on during his kickoff keynote at the Broadband Nation Expo is price regulation. If there’s one thing that gets service providers in the broadband industry riled up it’s the prospect of price regulation.
This was a topic that the Congresspeople at the recent House subcommittee hearing raised. They’re already claiming that the requirement that BEAD subgrantees offer a low-cost broadband option for low-income people amounts to rate regulation.
But in a recent blog for the Benton Institute, Levin wrote that an affordability requirement in a grant is not the same as price regulation. He said that under both Democrats and Republicans, the FCC has always imposed an affordability requirement as a condition for accepting government subsidies. And he noted that without the low-cost requirement service providers would charge fees unaffordable to many, defeating the whole point of reaching the final unserved.
(Brookings Institution)
Levin said the “chef’s kiss” of the House subcommittee hearing came from the Republicans’ own witness, Misty Ann Giles, who is the broadband director for the state of Montana. Giles said that based on the economic study Montana had done, her office proposed a price plan of $70 and that the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) had agreed.
“So, despite the Republican handwringing, their own witness testified that NTIA had not created a roadblock with the affordability criteria,” wrote Levin.
Giles had expressed some frustration with BEAD processes in her written testimony for the subcommittee hearing, but she didn’t indicate any problem with NTIA’s affordability requirement when questioned at the hearing.
The next phase of BEAD
Beginning in 2025, we’ll enter the next phase of the BEAD program, where it will start giving money to subgrantees to finally build out the networks to reach the unserved.
Fierce asked Levin whether BEAD has enough guardrails in place to avoid fraud and corruption, which can sometimes plague government grant programs. He said, “I think NTIA is actually doing a good job on that. But, the biggest problem with all these deployments is what happens after you give someone money like we’ve seen in RDOF with all these defaults.”
He said enforcement of construction guidelines can be tough. “It would be nice if Congress would have a hearing on that,” he concluded.
