Feds announce $42.5 billion in broadband grants to states

President Biden "announced Monday how nearly $42.5 billion in Broadband, Equity, Access and Deployment funds will be divided among states and territories, marking the federal government’s single-biggest investment in high-speed internet access," Lindsay McKenzie of StateScoop reports. "The BEAD allocations have been a long time coming, with states waiting for months to learn exactly how much funding they will receive from the $42.45 billion program."

White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients set the stage in a conference call with reporters last week, comparing the funding to the 1936 Rural Electrification Act, which he said “helped transform rural America, and importantly demonstrated that government can get things down for people.” Internet access is now a “must-have,” much as electricity was nine decades ago.

The funding to each state was determined by the Federal Communications Commission's broadband availability maps, the accuracy of which "has been called into question, but senior administration officials said Friday that these maps have been instrumental in determining where high-speed internet access is available in the U.S. and where it is not," McKenzie reports.

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