As modern life becomes increasingly reliant on access to the Internet, closing the digital divide is crucial to addressing economic inequality. The digital divide refers to the gap between those who have access to the Internet and those who do not. Increasingly, that divide severely limits economic opportunities for people in rural areas, resulting in many feeling left behind by today’s economy.
Recognizing this, Congress created the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program as part of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), which was signed into law in late 2021. IIJA authorized over $42 billion to connect all Americans to the internet and promote the adoption of this technology. The Biden Administration acted quickly to establish a notice of funding opportunity, which went out in May 2022.
Unfortunately, due to the extensive bureaucracy and unrelated criteria instituted around the program, not a single American has been connected via the BEAD program for broadband access nearly four years after Congress passed legislation directing the program to be established. For instance, companies participating in the program must meet a host of labor and climate resiliency requirements despite those requirements having no direct benefit to the goal of the program: closing the digital divide. This has opened debate around how to get Americans connected faster.
Congressional Republicans and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick have pushed for a variety of reforms for the program. This paper will focus on examining the debate around one key fix: making LEO satellite broadband an option for states to include in their plans without the roadblocks that are currently in place.
Democrats — along with some Republicans in the Senate — have pushed back on the idea of modifying the BEAD program in light of where states are in the process of finalizing their implementation plans and with concerns that further opening the program to LEO satellite broadband equates to a giveaway to special government employee and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk.
These issues are valid, and any modification to the program needs to be done with an eye towards mitigating any delays resulting from requirement changes, ensuring states retain the flexibility to select the technologies that are the best fits for given areas, and maintaining competition within the nascent LEO satellite broadband market. However, appropriately addressing these items and further inclusion of LEO satellite broadband in the program are not mutually exclusive.
