Evan Feinman has stepped down as the director of the $42.5 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program, reports ProPublica’s Craig Silverman in a Bluesky post today. BEAD aims to bring high-bandwidth internet to underserved areas of America, much of which is rural. Silverman shared screenshots from a department-wide email Feinman sent on Friday, in which he warned there would be “deeply negative outcomes” if the program shifts from fiber build-outs to using satellite-based internet like that which Elon Musk’s Starlink offers.
This month, Commerce Department Secretary Howard Lutnick announced a “rigorous review” of the program, which he said “has not connected a single person to the internet,” something he blamed on “woke mandates, favoritism towards certain technologies, and burdensome regulations.”
BEAD was introduced as part of the $1 trillion Biden-era infrastructure spending bill. The program offers $42.5 billion in grants to states to use toward building out internet infrastructure that would provide at least a 100Mbps down and 20Mbps up connection to underserved parts of the country. The program prioritizes fiber-based internet, but allows for other kinds where fiber isn’t proven to be tenable.
Getting from the start of the program to actual network buildouts has been a long, multi-step process that started with the FCC making a map of US broadband access and moves through state proposals, challenges to the FCC’s map, and selection of ISPs that will be paid to build new service. According to the government BEAD progress-tracking site, three states — Delaware, Louisiana, and Nevada — had made it to the last step of issuing a final proposal for public comment before the site stopped being updated regularly.
Lutnick’s announcement mirrors much of Republicans’ ongoing backlash to the program, some of whom say that Biden had blocked Starlink from being part of it for political reasons, as The New York Times wrote on March 5th. The Times notes FCC denials, most recently in 2023, that kept Musk’s company from getting $886 million in Universal Service Fund subsidies for a separate rural broadband program. The FCC said said the company couldn’t “demonstrate that it could deliver the promised service.”
The rules that Lutnick may propose could benefit Musk’s company, which was “expected to get up to $4.1 billion” under the BEAD program’s initial rules, according to The Wall Street Journal in March. The outlet said Starlink could get as much as $20 billion under Lutnick’s overhaul of the program.
In his staff email, featured below in Silverman’s screenshots, Feinman wrote that the overhaul could strand “all or part of rural America with worse internet so that we can make the world’s richest man even richer,” adding that it would be “yet another in a long line of betrayals by Washington.”
