Carr Updates Congress on Broadband Interagency Coordination

In a series of letters dated September 9, 2025, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr updated congressional leaders on steps taken by the Commission to improve data collection and interagency coordination efforts related to federal broadband infrastructure subsidies.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) published "Broadband Programs: Agencies Need to Further Improve Their Data Quality and Coordination Efforts" on April 28, 2025. That report, which I described in detail in a May post to the FSF Blog, highlighted shortcomings in the processes by which the four agencies primarily responsible for distributing billions in federal dollars – the FCC, NTIA, and the Departments of Treasury and Agriculture – share data to prevent the awarding of duplicate grants and the overbuilding of privately funded infrastructure.

It also identified concerns relating to the accuracy of the FCC's maps – the National Broadband Map and the Broadband Funding Map – and the efficacy of federal and state agency coordination.

To address these issues, the GAO report made 14 recommendations, six specific to the FCC.

In his letters to committee leadership in both the Senate and the House, Chairman Carr wrote that the Commission "is pleased to inform you that the Commission is actively addressing and incorporating GAO's six recommendations into [its] processes and interagency coordination of federal broadband funding projects."

Regarding data collection, the FCC, consistent with its internal corrective action plan, has been documenting internal policies and procedures, reviewing how mapping data is validated, and aligning processes relating to verifications, audits, and enforcement.

To improve interagency coordination, the Commission has been working with other agencies to establish a common definition of "covered data" for the purpose of information sharing as well as timelines governing that sharing process.

In conclusion, the letters assert that, "[t]ogether, when fully implemented, the Commission, as well as our sister agencies, expect these process improvements will further minimize wasteful duplicative funding."

For more on the critical importance of effective interagency coordination regarding broadband subsidies, I direct your attention to "The Failure's in the Footnote: Agencies Must Improve Broadband Expenditure Coordination Efforts," my January 2025 Perspectives from FSF Scholars, as well as the numerous Free State Foundation publications referenced therein.

A Revisionist History of the BEAD Program Ignores Congressional Intent

Today's Policyband (subscription required) included a useful pointed critique of a July 9 Washington Monthly article suggesting a clandestine plot by Republican lawmakers to sabotage from within the $42.45 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program. But there is even more that can be said by way of rebuttal.

The extraneous, partisan policies layered on top of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) by the Biden NTIA were not the issue, authors Paul Glastris and Kainoa Lowman insist. Instead, they make the unsupported claim that "the complexity and delays of the BEAD program and the broader failure of Washington over many years to solve the digital divide is overwhelmingly the result of telecom monopolies whose economic and political power previous administrations unleashed."

Likening NTIA's Notice of Funding Opportunity to an "everything bagel," the piece nevertheless goes to great lengths to assure us that requirements not found in the IIJA – promoting policies relating to labor standards, climate threats, net neutrality, third-party (so-called "open") access, and so on – "were not major time sinks." The real impediment, they suggest, was "incumbents' goal of avoiding competition to their existing infrastructure." The truth, meanwhile, is that lawmakers appropriately took reasonable steps to prevent the use of federal subsidies to overbuild privately financed networks to prevent waste and encourage additional private investment.

In the IIJA, Congress, exercising its authority under Article I of the Constitution's Spending Clause, reached a relatively rare bipartisan compromise. That compromise sought to learn from the mistakes of the past – mistakes that the authors describe at length – and once and for all connect those remaining locations not yet served by privately constructed broadband Internet infrastructure.

According to USTA | The Broadband Association, providers have invested nearly $2.2 trillion in broadband infrastructure since 1996 – including $94.7 billion just in 2023. Largely because of that capital spending, the FCC reported in May that "110 million homes and small businesses (95 percent) have access to a terrestrial fixed service with speeds of 100 Mbps download and 20 Mbps upload (100/20) or greater."

What the authors willfully choose to ignore is that the stated goal of the IIJA was to subsidize the prohibitively high price tag to connect primarily rural locations still "unserved" – not to use taxpayer dollars to compete with these existing, privately funded networks, which of course would disincentivize future investment.

Accordingly, Congress in the IIJA defined "unserved" as without access to speeds of at least 25/3 Mbps and "underserved" as lacking access to speeds of at least 100/20 Mbps; designated the FCC's then-under-development National Broadband Map as the definitive source of location-specific service availability information; established a challenge process to verify that information; and enlisted state-level offices to determine how best to overcome the unique geographic, financial, and other factors encountered within their borders.

To be sure, in practice BEAD Program implementation has left much to be desired. To suggest, however, that measures agreed to by Congress to avoid the wasteful overbuilding of existing broadband infrastructure using taxpayer dollars somehow tell a "story … of how telecom monopolies are behind the failure of government to solve the digital divide" ignores both the substantial role played by Biden NTIA overreach and the well-documented – in the article itself, no less – mistakes of the past.

Instead of engaging with the IIJA's actual text and structure, the authors rely on a convenient – but wrong-headed – narrative to try to deflect accountability away from those truly responsible and onto those that have invested the trillions necessary to connect nearly every location in the U.S.

GAO Flags Broadband Funding Coordination Concerns

Last month, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a report on the state of federal broadband funding interagency coordination. Not for the first time, it flagged breakdowns in process that could lead to duplication, waste, fraud, and abuse.

Publicly released on April 28, "Broadband Programs: Agencies Need to Further Improve Their Data Quality and Coordination Efforts," identifies two concerns:

1. The FCC's failure to evaluate and document the accuracy of the service availability data underlying its National Broadband Map, which "adds both to the risk that agencies leveraging these data cannot effectively target funding to areas that lack high-speed internet and to users' existing concerns about the data's reliability."
   
   
2. The need for the FCC, NTIA, and the Departments of Agriculture and Treasury to define with sufficient clarity their coordination processes to "better position the agencies to sustain their collaboration, manage fragmented federal broadband efforts, and ensure that the considerable federal broadband funding is spent efficiently and effectively."

Regarding the National Broadband Map, the Report states that:

FCC officials described its processes for data validations, verifications, audits, and enforcement referrals as a new workstream that continues to be informed by fresh rounds of data, citing this as the reason why FCC had not yet formally evaluated or finalized formal operating procedures for these processes. However, without evaluating the effectiveness of its validations, verifications, audits, and referrals processes, FCC cannot know the extent to which these processes are sufficient to ensure the accuracy of the data in the National Broadband Map.

With respect to interagency coordination, the Report identifies three shortcomings: (1) no clear shared definition as to what the "covered data" that the agencies have agreed to share actually entails; (2) delays in the submission of data to be included in the FCC's Broadband Funding Map, a separate map that I described in a May 2023 Perspectives from FSF Scholars; and (3) the fact that "officials … have not established a formal process to de-duplicate their funding prior to making decisions about projects to fund."

To address these concerns, the Report presents 14 recommendations for executive action.

As you may recall, the GAO assessed broadband funding interagency coordination efforts once before, in May 2022. As I noted in a contemporaneous post to the Free State Foundation's blog, "Broadband: National Strategy Needed to Guide Federal Efforts to Reduce Digital Divide" identified "at least 133 funding programs that could support increased broadband access" under the purview of 15 different agencies and warned that "[t]his patchwork of programs could lead to wasteful duplication of funding and effort."

PRESS RELEASE: FSF Files Comments in Response to the FCC’s “Section 706” Inquiry

 

Free State Foundation President Randolph May and Senior Fellow Andrew Long filed comments with the FCC today in response to the Commission’s “Section 706” Inquiry.

Immediately below are four paragraphs excerpted from the beginning of the Introduction and Summary of the Free State Foundation’s extensive data-rich authoritative comments.

 

The plain text of Section 706 posits two straightforward empirical queries. One, to what extent is "advanced telecommunications capability" – that is, broadband Internet access at sufficient speeds to satisfy actual consumer needs – currently available to all Americans? And two, with respect to those locations where "broadband" is not yet available, is it being deployed in a reasonable and timely fashion? Thanks to the Broadband DATA Act and the Commission's implementing efforts, for the first time interested parties participating in a Section 706 inquiry have at their disposal an official, communal data source upon which responses can be based: the National Broadband Map.

Consequently, these questions never have been so easy to answer – nor have the responses ever been so incontrovertibly clear. Data recently made available by Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel (though curiously not included in the Section 706 NOI itself) reveals that, as of May 2023, only 7.2 million out of a total of 115 million serviceable locations – just over 6 percent – were unserved. Incredibly, and at the same time the accuracy of the data was improving, the number of unserved locations shrank by more than 13 percent, or 1.1 million, in only six months. Thus, with reference to the specific metric called for by Congress and developed by the FCC itself, broadband undeniably is both available and being deployed in a reasonable and timely fashion.

Further, the Biden Administration's "Internet For All" initiative, which encompasses a dizzying number of federal subsidy programs administered by a worrisome number of different agencies, is in the process of injecting tens of billions into the network infrastructure construction pipeline. As touted in a June 2023 White House press release regarding the $42.45 billion Broadband Equity, Affordability, and Deployment (BEAD) Program, "President Biden and Vice President Harris are delivering on their historic commitment to connect everyone in America to reliable, affordable high-speed Internet by the end of the decade" (emphasis added).

Thus, there should be no doubt: $2 trillion and counting in private investment since 1996 has brought broadband to the vast majority of Americans, and existing federal subsidy programs are doling out tens of billions so that even the most cost-prohibitive locations are being connected. There is an inevitable lag between the commitment of funds and when networks become operational – one that the Commission could do more to shorten, especially with respect to pole attachment disputes, permitting, access to rights of way, and other bureaucratic red tape – but with an absolute minimum of $140 billion in taxpayer dollars committed to closing those digital divides that remain, not to mention matching funds as well as state and local money, there is every reason to conclude that nothing is standing in the way of universal broadband availability.

 

BEAD Program State-by-State Funding Allocations Announced

On June 26, 2023, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) announced the amount of funding each state and territory would receive from the $42.45 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program. The focus now shifts to state broadband offices, which have 180 days to submit their Initial Proposals.

The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), which established the BEAD Program, specified that every state would receive a minimum of $100 million in broadband infrastructure construction subsidies. Additional allocation decisions reflect the number of "unserved" locations – that is, those that lack access to a high-speed Internet connection at speeds of at least 25 Megabits per second (Mbps) downstream and 3 Mbps upstream (25/3 Mbps) – and "underserved" locations: those where speeds of at least 100/20 Mbps are not yet available.

Congress in the IIJA specified that the FCC's National Broadband Map, unveiled in November 2022 and updated in May, would serve as the definitive source for current service availability information. NTIA's BEAD Program funding allocations, therefore, in part are based on the number of "unserved" and "underserved" locations in a given state as indicated by the National Broadband Map.

As I have noted repeatedly, however, most recently in "Wasteful Duplication by Design: A Case Study on Overlapping Federal Broadband Subsidies," a May 2023 Perspectives from FSF Scholars, the BEAD Program's eligibility requirements, set forth in a Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO), treat locations with access to "broadband" provided via satellite or unlicensed spectrum as "unserved."

Accordingly, there is a real danger that BEAD Program money will be used to overbuild existing, privately funded networks. In the above-referenced Perspectives, I focused on a nearby neighborhood here in Colorado where, despite the existence of six competitors, four of which offer speeds that exceed 25/3 Mbps, BEAD Program subsidies might be awarded to yet another provider – simply because of the most-cost-effective technologies selected by those already serving consumers.

The BEAD Program allocation announcement reveals that Colorado is eligible to receive $827 million. Going forward I will keep a close eye on the areas to which that money is made available.

In addition, it is important to keep in mind that the National Broadband Map reveals only where service is available at the time of the data collection – for the updated version released in May, that would be the end of 2022. It does not reflect where federal money has been awarded but construction has not been completed (or even commenced, in many cases).

That responsibility falls to the FCC's other map: the Broadband Funding Map, the release of which I highlighted in a May 2023 post to the Free State Foundation's blog. Intended to facilitate critical interagency coordination efforts – as the Government Accountability Office (GAO) reiterated recently, the existence of over 130 different subsidy programs run by 15 different federal agencies amounts to a "patchwork of programs [that] could lead to wasteful duplication of funding and effort" – Congress required the creation of the Broadband Funding Map to illustrate those areas to which money from other sources (Treasury, Agriculture, and so on) has been committed.

At present, however, the bulk of those hundreds of billions in federal dollars are in process, thereby further complicating oversight efforts. For example, the Colorado Broadband Office, tasked with distributing $162 million just from Treasury's Capital Projects Fund, only began to accept applications on June 20, 2023.

FCC Releases Broadband Funding Map

As required by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, yesterday the FCC released the Broadband Funding Map, a companion to the National Broadband Map intended to "to provide a locations overview of the overall geographic footprint of each broadband infrastructure deployment project funded by the Federal Government."

However, and as I highlighted in "Wasteful Duplication by Design: A Case Study on Overlapping Federal Broadband Subsidies," a recent Perspectives from FSF Scholars, the Broadband Funding Map's ability to prevent overbuilding and redundant funding is curtailed significantly by conflicting eligibility requirements across subsidy programs – including inconsistent minimum speed thresholds and exclusionary lists of approved distribution technologies – that open the door to duplication.

For the record, the Broadband Funding Map describes the neighborhood in the foothills west of Denver that was the focus of my case study as "Not Funded." Given that many federal funding sources, including the $42.45 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program, have not yet begun doling out dollars, this perhaps is not surprising.

I intend to revisit the Broadband Funding Map periodically as more funding decisions are made. Stay tuned.

GAO Protest Resolved: FCC Sets Due Date for Broadband Map Data

Recent developments hopefully will bring closer to completion the updated FCC broadband service availability maps upon which numerous subsidy programs depend. Significantly, a challenge filed by a losing bidder for a foundational multimillion dollar contract has been resolved. Meanwhile, the Commission has specified what data broadband providers must submit and set a September 1, 2022, filing deadline.

The Broadband Deployment Accuracy and Technological Availability (DATA) Act states that a number of broadband funding programs must rely upon new, more accurate, but not-yet-completed FCC broadband service availability maps when determining which locations in fact are unserved – and therefore eligible for subsidies.

That list includes NTIA's $42.45 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program, the FCC's $9 billion 5G for Rural America Fund, and the $11.2 billion second phase of its Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF).

Moreover, and as I argued in "Overlapping Broadband Appropriations Demand Agency Coordination: New FCC Maps Can Track Grants, Avert Waste," a recent Perspectives from FSF Scholars, those maps can and should be leveraged to safeguard against duplicative grants, overbuilds of privately financed networks, and waste and fraud.

Notably, these same concerns inspired a March 15, 2022, letter from Senator Roger Wicker (R – MS), ranking member of the Senate Commerce Committee, to the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee (PRAC). In his letter, Senator Wicker urged the PRAC to perform the oversight necessary "to ensure the federal funds allocated for broadband deployment are spent as Congress intended."

However, and as I pointed out in "Waiting for Updated FCC Broadband Maps," a February 2022 post to the Free State Foundation's blog, those maps are not yet ready for primetime. And their completion date remains TBD.

Fortunately, one significant hurdle standing in the way – a challenge to the FCC's decision to award a $44.9 million contract to CostQuest Associates (CostQuest) – has been cleared.

On November 9, 2021, the FCC selected CostQuest over a number of competing applicants to create the "Broadband Serviceable Location Fabric" – that is, the master list of every conceivable location to which high-speed Internet service might be provided. Shortly thereafter, one of the losing bidders, LightBox Parent, LP (LightBox), filed a protest with the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO).

In a February 24, 2022, decision, the GAO denied in part and dismissed in part that protest, finding that the FCC "conducted a tradeoff and concluded that CostQuest's proposal represented the best value to the government."

A March 2, 2022, CostQuest press release announced that it "has officially been contracted to deliver the broadband location data to support the Commission's Broadband Data Collection (BDC) program."

In addition, the FCC recently released three Public Notices and one Order offering clarity and guidance to fixed and mobile broadband providers:

• On February 22, 2022, it announced a September 1, 2022, deadline for the submission of broadband availability data.
• On March 4, 2022, it released a Public Notice defining "specifications related to the biannual submission of subscription, availability, and supporting data."
• On March 9, 2022, it adopted an Order detailing "the mobile challenge, verification, and crowdsourcing processes" required by the Broadband DATA Act and a Public Notice announcing the publication of "two data specifications … provid[ing] additional detail about the technical elements of the data to be collected as part of" those processes.

Four States Added to NTIA's National Broadband Availability Map in July, Bringing Total to 22

NTIA announced on July 23 that two more states, Indiana and Georgia, are participating in the National Broadband Availability Map (NBAM). Along with Wyoming and Washington State, two additions disclosed earlier that month, a total of 22 states are now involved.

Not to be confused with the original National Broadband Map that was decommissioned several years ago, or the FCC's current, but frequently criticized, Fixed Broadband Deployment Map, the NBAM was authorized by Congress in 2018. It utilizes geographic information system (GIS) technology, as well as multiple public (including FCC Form 477) and non-public data sets, to visualize for state and federal policymakers ("partners") those specific areas that currently are unserved. Because the NBAM incorporates proprietary information, it is not available to the general public.

In a July 29 Perspectives from FSF Scholars, "Legislative 'Best Practices' to Expand and Accelerate Broadband Coverage," I discussed, among other topics, the importance of accurate coverage maps for federal subsidy programs targeting unserved areas; efforts by the FCC (the Digital Opportunity Data Collection (DODC)) and Congress (the Broadband DATA Act) to produce modernized, publicly available maps; and the pressing need for funding to make those maps a reality.