BEAD: Just a couple of days ago, NTIA Administrator Arielle Roth was flexing her BEAD billfold. In a Sept. 5 press release, NTIA hailed the news that Team Trump’s takeover of the $42.25 billion BEAD program had yielded savings of “at least $13 billion for American taxpayers.” Roth gushed, “After years of delay, the Trump Administration has made monumental progress in moving the BEAD program forward,” Yesterday, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry, a Republican, sent a letter to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick effectively saying, “Nice going, Arielle, but that $13 billion belongs to the states to spend on soft programs unrelated to broadband deployment.” In Louisiana’s case, Landry is asking Lutnick to send him a check for $857 million, in a Cajun cash grab that other states are almost certainly itching to copy. The timing of the letter was aggressive: No state, including Louisiana, has received NTIA approval of its final BEAD broadband funding plan; and in August, NTIA Chief of Staff Brooke Donilon stressed to a conference packed with state broadband officers that BEAD “is a deployment program. It’s not a non-deployment program.” (More after paywall.)
