Op-Ed: John Czwartacki: How to connect America’s heartland and fix Biden’s mess
John Czwartacki has a plan to fix the Biden administration's BEAD mess. Read on for the details.
Getting all of America access to high speed broadband has long been universally championed. It has been an industry and political priority since my earliest days when I worked at Verizon. We were trying to squeeze broadband from copper lines with DSL in the 2000s. Yet, over the last few years, support for rural America has become a fraught political football. Politicians from both sides of the aisle attempt to boost rural healthcare, rural infrastructure, even rural banking. But the proof is always in the pudding, and far too often these proposals wear a sheep’s clothing to mask a deceptive hidden agenda.
President Joe Biden’s Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program is a prime example of the latter.
Launched under the 2021 Infrastructure Act, the BEAD Program was billed as a $42 billion effort to close the digital divide by funding high speed internet in underserved areas. But over time, BEAD was revealed to be little more than a bureaucratic boondoggle, and a vehicle for political activism with regulations and requirements prioritizing political wish-list items including union labor requirements, DEI, and climate change assessments, among countless others.
While the Biden administration authorized all $42 billion, only a fraction of that money has actually been spent, with most of it still tied up in state planning, permitting, and paperwork, leaving rural communities waiting for results.
The Trump administration recognized how mired in bureaucratic red tape BEAD had become and moved quickly to simplify. In mid- 2025, they issued “Benefit of the Bargain” (BOTB) reforms, requiring states to complete 90-day rewrites and removing several of the most restrictive constraints embedded in the original design. These changes made an immediate difference. Independent analyses show projected fiber costs fell and cleaning up flawed location data reduced the number of unserved homes, creating at least $13 billion in savings.
These improvements showed what happens when bureaucratic red tape is minimized and states are empowered to make a program actually work for their residents, without the crushing burden of far-left political interests.
But even with BOTB’s progress, one major constraint remains, a structural holdover from the original Biden-era rules. Under legacy federal guidance, states still cannot use BEAD funds for broader mobile infrastructure, such as 5G towers or satellite-based solutions. BEAD remains tied to “deployment,” biased toward the slow stringing of fiber and defined only as service to individual locations. This Washington-made choke point applies even in rural regions where the fastest, most practical solution would be regional mobile coverage reaching entire communities.
In effect, states can run fiber to a single home, but they cannot use BEAD dollars to build the tower that would give the entire county reliable service. This regulatory handcuff remains one of the program’s last major self-imposed limitations.
The Trump administration has the opportunity to remove this last barrier and fully unleash BEAD to finally deliver for rural America. Allowing states to dedicate a portion of BOTB’s savings to mobile infrastructure would speed up buildout times, close coverage gaps, and complement work already underway. And it would achieve that without spending a single additional taxpayer dollar.
From the estimated $21 billion in BEAD saved, about $8 billion could be used to build roughly 6,000 major 5G towers nationwide. That investment would push the country toward 99 percent coverage, eliminating rural dead zones that a fiber-only approach simply cannot reach. In the most remote areas, emerging direct-to-cell satellite technologies, like those offered by Elon Musk’s Starlink, can efficiently fill the gap without unnecessary construction.
For once this isn’t about passing the political football, it’s about removing red tape and delivering for America’s heartland.
With one move, the Trump administration could succeed where the Biden administration failed, close the digital divide, and save over $10 billion in the process. More than $10 billion in remaining BOTB savings could (and should) be responsibly returned to the the taxpayers.
The American people are sick of political box-checking, and rural America is tired of being a meal ticket for the political agendas of people who could not care less about them. President Donald Trump has a powerful opportunity to fix this, give rural America the connectivity they deserve, and even restore some fiscal sanity to Washington.
John Czwartacki is a former CFPB official and co-founder and principal at Public Policy Solutions.