Tim Stelzig: Explaining BEAD, Broadband Abundance?
The aspects of the program that have been criticized most widely have nothing to do with Democrats’ preference for process over results.
Tim Stelzig
Prior to March 2025, I helped manage NTIA’s $42.45 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program. Created by the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the BEAD program aims to ensure all Americans have access to fast, affordable, and reliable internet service, a goal the nation has been working and failing to achieve for decades.
(NTIA stands for the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, which is a subagency of the U.S. Department of Commerce.)
NTIA’s broadband grant program has taken some heat in recent weeks. Perhaps most prominently, Ezra Klein appeared on John Stewart’s show as both men expressed amazement that more than three years had passed since the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law was enacted without a single person being connected to broadband service as a result of BEAD grants.
The comedic bit consisted largely of Ezra Klein reading a program official’s own description of the regulatory process in a mocking tone as John Stewart listened in feigned speechlessness to what sounded like a Byzantine regulatory process churning away for years without delivering promised results.
Ezra Klein was using the BEAD program as an illustration of a core thesis of Abundance, his new book co-authored with Derek Thomson. One of the key arguments in Abundance is that over the years an accretion of federal regulation and established practices have created a bureaucracy that prioritizes process over results.
This tends to harm Democrats’ electoral chances given that long-term political gains cannot be obtained without delivering short-term benefits. Accordingly, they argue Democrats should focus more on achieving results quickly, even if at the expense of other progressive policy goals like stakeholder inclusion, environmental protection, and preventing waste, fraud and abuse.
The John Stewart BEAD episode was deeply misleading and raised the ire of Biden Administration officials. Ezra Klein subsequently published a clarification in a New York Times article, and Derek Thomson also clarified that “we got some of this wrong, in the process of describing” the BEAD program despite not using it as an example in the book. Ezra Klein, Derek Thompson, and John Stewart can all be excused for not being experts in broadband infrastructure deployment programs. And in fairness, there is something tragically funny in how long it can take to turn “free money” into tangible benefits for the American people.
Even so, the BEAD program is not a good illustration of an outsized bureaucratic preference for process. To the contrary, the program’s senior leadership - my former leadership - exemplified the very attributes of results-oriented pragmatism Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson are championing in Abundance. Having worked in Washington my entire professional life in both public and private capacities, I found NTIA and Commerce’s senior leadership incredibly refreshing. More than any other place I have ever worked, they emphasized results over process at almost every step, insofar as permitted by law. They also empowered staff with a spirit of bounded entrepreneurialism that enabled the program—at least behind the scenes—to move forward in many respects at a breakneck speed, especially by Washington standards.
Admittedly, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act was signed into law in November 2021 and now, approximately 3.5 years later, the BEAD program has put very few shovels in the ground. The BEAD program is also highly complex, has numerous procedural steps, and not every policy decision was made in a timely way. However, the aspects of the program that have been criticized most widely—the timeline above and the basic structure of the grant approval process—have nothing to do with Democrats’ preference for process over results.
On the contrary, the BEAD program’s overall timeline and its key procedural steps are tailor-made to deliver timely benefits within the constraints of statutory imperatives created through bi-partisan consensus. That, in a nutshell, is exactly how the American democratic process is supposed to work in the ideal.
That a shining example of government done right can be so easily misunderstood and mischaracterized—notwithstanding the best of intentions and what I trust was non-trivial due diligence on the part of Klein, Thompson and Stewart among others—illustrates how incredibly difficult it can be to communicate success in our complex world and current media environment, and also how incredibly easy it is to tear things down.
This is the first in a series of four posts. My hope is that taking the time to provide relevant context will make it easier to understand what Congress was trying to accomplish with the BEAD program, why it structured the program the way it did, how that program structure impacts the timeline, and why certain program changes the Trump Administration is considering would tend to undermine the main purpose Congress was trying to achieve.
Tim Stelzig is a former Senior Policy Advisor and Regional Director of NTIA's BEAD program. This piece was first published on his personal Substack on May 14, 2025, and is republished with permission.
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