*The following story by Broadband Breakfast Reporter Jake Neenan was originally published here.
The Commerce Department has approved 18 final spending plans under its $42.45 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program. One state, Louisiana, had access to its funding, according to the agency.
Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration said Tuesday morning that plans had been approved from 15 states:
Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Hawaii, Iowa, Louisiana, Maine, Montana, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Virginia, and Wyoming – and three territories – American Samoa, the Commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands, and Guam.
NTIA approval is one of the last steps before states and territories can start signing contracts and projects can get underway. Louisiana had gone through the remaining reviews and had access to its BEAD deployment funding Tuesday, NTIA said.
The agency said it would post more information on the approved final proposals on their BEAD website. The documents themselves weren’t online Tuesday morning.
It’s not clear to what extent the approved plans differ from the preliminary grant awards states posted in recent months. A major goal of the NTIA when it updated the program’s rules in June was to push deployment spending down, and as part of the approval process states in some cases had to revise tentative awards the agency considered too expensive.
NTIA said the approved states and territories came in $6 billion under budget relative to their BEAD allocations.
NTIA Administrator Arielle Roth and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick touted the cost savings in statements on the milestone. It's not clear what will happen to that cash, but Roth floated using some of it to streamline permitting processes in a recent speech.
“The Trump Administration is on track to deliver universal connectivity in the United States once and for all, with huge cost savings for the American people,” Roth said in a statement. “The Final Proposals approved today show that the Benefit of the Bargain reforms are working and that our focus on results and strong oversight is paying dividends for communities across the country.”
States had been planning to use leftover money for broadband adoption efforts, among other things, under the Biden administration, but the Trump NTIA isn't eager to see much of that spending.
The agency rescinded approval for any such activities in June, saying more guidance would come in the future.
The approvals are ahead of the schedule NTIA set for itself. It said it would review and approve state plans within 90 days of submission, and 36 states and territories submitted plans by the Sept. 4 deadline the agency set after updating the program’s rules in June.
NTIA said that as of Tuesday, 53 of the 56 states and territories had submitted final proposals. California is the only state not to have done so. The state’s broadband office says NTIA asked the state to again postpone releasing a public draft earlier this month.
Inline headshot of NTIA administrator Arielle Roth courtesy of NTIA website
