While States are scurrying to award Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment infrastructure funds before September 4, the other portion of BEAD—non-deployment funds—is in limbo. For those who haven’t been following BEAD closely, non-deployment funds are any remaining money after a State has made awards to bring broadband to every BEAD unserved and underserved location. Because of the uneven nature of allocating BEAD funding to States, some States didn’t expect to have any non-deployment funding, while others expected significant non-deployment funds. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s original guidance suggested that non-deployment funds could be used for projects related to broadband adoption, providing broadband devices to the public, digital skills training, and other activities to complement BEAD’s universal connectivity goals. The new rules from NTIA in the Notice expect States to reduce the money spent on broadband infrastructure since the new BEAD grant rules give top priority to providers that request the lowest amount of money to achieve the desired BEAD goal of 100/20 Mbps. If NTIA sticks to the rules determined by the BEAD legislation, then any reduction in spending on infrastructure would mean increased funding for non-deployment purposes. However, some policy folks expect that NTIA will kill all non-deployment funds as a way to take credit for ‘returning’ money to the Treasury.

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