Deputy NTIA Administrator Sarah Morris on Monday defended the agency's pace in administering the BEAD program (see 2412120066). The agency has moved "at breakneck speed" to get funding out the door and is making "tremendous strides," Morris said during an American Association for Public Broadband webinar. "We are working with the program that Congress gave us and trying to do this work as quickly as possible, as carefully as possible, and do it in a way that itself is innovative when it comes to federal programs."
Citing "many important steps" in the BEAD process, Morris noted that the agency was ahead of schedule on funding allocation announcements and state challenge processes are being developed. "The states are essentially determining the implementation strategy for the funding that they've been given," she said.
Morris dismissed concerns about programmatic changes under the incoming Trump administration. NTIA will continue supporting states and "keep this program moving, so we can hand them off to the next administration in the strongest shape that's absolutely possible." She added, "We have so much momentum right now ... We can disagree about the details of implementation and where others might feel we need to make course corrections at the margins, but fundamentally ... these programs are just so important, so critical, so intertwined and so far along, that the best path forward is to just keep up the momentum that we've built."
Morris encouraged those feeling anxious about BEAD's future to engage with their state broadband offices and to educate lawmakers on how BEAD and other NTIA broadband grant programs were designed to complement each other. The agency is reviewing applications for its digital equity competitive grant program, she noted.
Reposted with permission from Communications Daily