Austin News

U.S. Senate Commerce Committee Ranking Member Ted Cruz (R-Texas) is seeking explanations regarding a nearly billion-dollar administrative fund that the Biden-Harris administration allocated from a program intended to provide high-speed internet access to Americans.

The administration reportedly withheld these funds from its $42.45 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program, creating a bureaucracy that imposed what Cruz describes as unlawful left-wing mandates on states, leading to significant delays in the program.

In 2021, Vice President Harris was assigned to lead efforts to improve nationwide internet access. Despite her assertion in April 2021 that “[w]e can bring broadband to rural America today,” the BEAD program has not connected any households to broadband over the past three years.

Sen. Cruz's letter details how the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) redirected $849 million of BEAD funding towards administrative expenses, which he claims were used to enforce policies such as rate regulation, unionized labor requirements, climate change regulations, and technology mandates without legal authorization. These actions have reportedly delayed the program and increased costs.

Cruz wrote:

“In 2021, Congress enacted the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, establishing and funding the $42.45 billion BEAD program to bring internet access to all Americans—an unprecedented expense of taxpayer dollars for internet connectivity. Despite National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s (NTIA) three-year-old clear statutory mandate to bring the internet to the unserved, your agency has failed to connect a single American."

“What NTIA has done with the money so far is create a nearly billion-dollar slush fund to ‘administer’ the program. Specifically, NTIA has withheld $849 million in BEAD funding for its own budget. This appears to have enabled NTIA to impose excessive administrative burdens and pursue the Biden-Harris administration’s extreme left-wing social policies, without legal authority[…]"

“NTIA has sought to misuse its BEAD authorities to impose rate regulation, unionized labor requirements, climate change regulations, technology mandates, and other extralegal policies on the States. This has continued despite Congress repeatedly reminding NTIA that Congress gave it no statutory authority to use BEAD for any of these social goals. NTIA has also begun enforcing these left-wing priorities on States through a convoluted bureaucratic process requiring States to submit two different sets of detailed proposals for BEAD funding review and approval. This protracted process all but guarantees there will be no BEAD-funded infrastructure development this year. Indeed, as of the writing of this letter almost 30 states—including Texas—have not received final approval of their second proposal."

“As I warned in my Red Light Report last year, NTIA also created unnecessary delays and inflated the costs of expanding internet access by insisting that only a narrow set of technologies for connecting American households was permissible. While NTIA appears to have changed course and adopted my recommendation that BEAD be more technology neutral—a significant improvement—NTIA now claims BEAD isn’t a connectivity program. Instead it’s a ‘jobs program.’ It appears however that the only ‘jobs’ created from BEAD are for government bureaucrats."

“BEAD’s hard-earned taxpayer dollars should be spent as Congress authorized—to bring internet access to all Americans—not held hostage to central planning edicts or left-wing priorities.”

As part of his investigation into delays within the BEAD program, Sen. Cruz requested detailed information about administrative funding allocation by NTIA and updates on proposal approvals or denials.