Cantwell, Schatz Press Commerce Department on Freeze of NTIA Tribal Broadband Funding
Senate Commerce Committee ranking member Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., and Indian Affairs Committee Vice Chairman Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, pressed top Commerce Department officials late Thursday to explain why the Trump administration has frozen $980 million in unobligated Tribal Broadband Connectivity Program (TBCP) funding and halted an additional $294 million allocated in December 2024. Meanwhile, Senate Small Business Committee Chair Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, is circulating a draft bill, called the Recovering Excess Communications Appropriations While Protecting Telecommunications Upgrades, Reinvestment and Expansion (Recapture) Act, in a bid to claw back states’ non-deployment BEAD funding.
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“TBCP is the first NTIA program to recognize Tribes’ sovereignty to determine broadband infrastructure needs on their own lands and is an effective tool for connecting Tribal homes and community facilities to reliable and affordable broadband,” Cantwell and Schatz said in a letter to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and NTIA Administrator Arielle Roth. “We are concerned that the agency is reportedly applying additional unnecessary standards and requirements to applications, resulting in uncertainty that threatens the success of existing and planned projects.”
Cantwell and Schatz asked Commerce to tell them “when NTIA will award and obligate” TBCP funding and whether the agency will “impose new guidance, requirements, or performance criteria” on qualifying projects. The Democrats cited the Trump administration’s decision to revise BEAD rules earlier this year and require all state governments to resubmit their funding applications (see 2506060052). The senators asked whether NTIA is “screening or reviewing project applications using any percentile-based cost metrics, including evaluating TBCP projects based on whether they are within the 65th or 85th percentile of state BEAD costs.” They also pressed Commerce officials on how the revised BEAD rules affected projects with pending TBCP awards.
Commerce and NTIA didn’t immediately comment. Congressional Democrats have raised concerns this year about freezes on some other pots of connectivity money established by the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, including President Donald Trump’s move in May to block $550 million in Digital Equity Act funding (see 2505090051).
Ernst’s draft Recapture Act would claw back more than $20 billion in BEAD funding that states haven’t “designated for a specific purpose” in their final spending proposals. Congress allocated $42.5 billion for the program in the IIJA. Last year, Ernst urged Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency advisory group to recommend that lawmakers “pull the plug” on BEAD funding as part of its bid to slash $2 trillion from the federal budget (see 2412030050).
Ernst’s office didn’t comment Friday. Her draft bill would change IIJA’s language reallocating states’ unused BEAD funding to other entities, putting it toward deficit reduction instead. States have cited a range of non-deployment uses for their pots of BEAD funding, including mapping, affordable broadband service in apartment buildings and connectivity adoption initiatives (see 2511050034).