Rural Broadband and the 69 Senators Who Voted to Pay for It

On the morning of August 10, 2021, the Senate voted 69 to 30 to pass a bill of more than two thousand pages that its authors had spent most of the summer negotiating in a series of meetings, dinners and late-night phone calls. Nineteen Republicans, including the minority leader, Mitch McConnell, joined all fifty members of the Democratic caucus. The bill was the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, and most of the news coverage focused on roads, bridges, water pipes and transit. Tucked inside was the largest federal commitment to internet access in the country's history: about $65 billion, the bulk of it meant to bring high-speed service to homes and businesses that had never had it. A good share of those homes were in places represented by the Republicans who voted yes. Five years later, it is fair to ask what happened to the money, and why a promise that crossed party lines in 2021 turned into an argument about satellites in 2025.

In short: The 2021 infrastructure law created a $42.45 billion program, known as BEAD, to build broadband to unserved places, and a separate monthly discount that helped more than 23 million households pay for service. The discount ran out of money in 2024, and in 2025 the Commerce Department rewrote the building program's rules to drop its preference for fiber and open more of the money to satellite service. Rural Americans of both parties still need the connection the law promised.

The map that would not stay still

Before you can understand the broadband money, you have to understand the maps. For years, the Federal Communications Commission measured coverage by census block, counting an entire block as served if a single home in it could get service. In rural areas, where a census block can be large, that rule made coverage look far better than it was. Families who could not stream a video lesson for their kids lived in places that official maps showed as connected.

The pandemic made the gap impossible to ignore. In the spring of 2020, schools went online and offices went home, and the parking lots of libraries and fast-food restaurants filled with students doing homework on the free Wi-Fi. Telehealth suddenly mattered to rural patients who lived hours from a specialist. Farmers who had adopted precision agriculture needed data connections in the field. The political reality was simple: broadband had become something people in every kind of district were demanding from their representatives.

Congress responded in stages, first with emergency programs in 2020 and early 2021, then with the infrastructure bill. The new law required better maps, and the FCC built a more detailed national map showing coverage address by address. Those maps would determine how much money each state received.

What the 69 senators voted for

The broadband title of the infrastructure law had several parts, but two mattered most to households.

The first was the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program, or BEAD, with $42.45 billion to be administered by the Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration. Every state got a base amount, and the rest was allocated according to the number of unserved and underserved locations on the new maps. In June 2023, the administration announced each state's share. States had to write plans, hold challenge processes where providers and residents could dispute the maps, and run competitions to choose who would build. The original rules, written under the Biden administration, gave a strong priority to fiber-optic lines, on the theory that fiber, though expensive, would last for decades and could be upgraded as needs grew.

The second was the Affordable Connectivity Program, which gave eligible low-income households a discount of up to $30 a month on internet service, more on tribal lands. It was funded with about $14 billion and built on an emergency benefit created earlier in the pandemic. Enrollment grew to more than 23 million households, a remarkable number for a federal program that many eligible people had never heard of.

There was also money for tribal broadband, digital skills training and middle-mile networks, the long-haul lines that carry traffic between towns. Taken together, it was meant to solve two problems at once: getting a line to the house, and making sure the family in the house could afford to use it.

Why Republicans voted yes

The nineteen Republican votes were not an accident. The bill was negotiated by a bipartisan group of senators, with Rob Portman of Ohio and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona among the lead negotiators, and broadband was one of its most popular components among Republicans. Rural internet access was a priority for senators from states like West Virginia, Alaska, Maine and Louisiana, and it had long had support from farm groups, rural electric cooperatives and small-town chambers of commerce.

Some Republicans who voted no argued that the bill spent too much, that it would fuel inflation, or that broadband money would be wasted on overbuilding areas that already had service. Those were not frivolous objections. Earlier federal rural broadband programs had a mixed record, with some subsidy winners failing to build what they promised. The concern about waste was a fair one to carry into implementation.

But the vote showed something important: a large group of members from both parties agreed that internet access had become basic infrastructure, as the rural electric lines of the 1930s had been, and that the market alone would not reach the last homes on long dirt roads.

What changed after 2024

The first blow came to the discount. The Affordable Connectivity Program was funded with a fixed sum, and at the rate households were enrolling, the money ran out. The program stopped taking new enrollments in early 2024, and the last full month of benefits was April 2024. Bills to extend it drew sponsors from both parties, but Congress did not pass an extension. Millions of families saw their bills rise or dropped service.

The second change came to BEAD. By the time the Trump administration took office in January 2025, most states had their initial plans approved but very little construction had started, because the challenge processes and competitions took time. Critics, including Republicans in Congress and the new commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, argued that the program had been slowed by rules on fiber, labor, climate resilience and affordability that went beyond what Congress required. In June 2025, the Commerce Department issued new guidance that removed the fiber preference, told states to treat technologies more equally and choose the lowest-cost options, and required many states to redo their competitions. That opened a larger share of the money to low-earth-orbit satellite services, such as SpaceX's Starlink, and to fixed wireless.

Here is where reasonable people disagree. Supporters of the change argue that satellite service has improved dramatically, that it can reach the most remote homes far faster and more cheaply than fiber, and that waiting years for perfect fiber while families go unconnected is its own kind of failure. Critics argue that satellite capacity is limited, that monthly costs and equipment can be expensive for rural households, and that a one-time public investment should buy infrastructure that will last for decades rather than a subscription to a private network. Both arguments contain real truths. I think the stronger case is for fiber wherever it is reasonably achievable, with satellite as a bridge for the truly remote, but this is an argument and not a settled fact.

The co-ops that strung fiber on their own

While Washington argued, some of the most effective rural broadband builders turned out to be organizations that had been around for nearly a century. Rural electric cooperatives, the member-owned utilities created with New Deal loans to bring power to farms, already had poles, rights of way, billing systems and line crews in exactly the places big internet providers had skipped. Over the past decade and a half, a number of them started fiber subsidiaries and began wiring their members' homes, sometimes with federal or state grants and sometimes on their own balance sheets.

Their logic was familiar. A private company deciding where to build compares the cost of a mile of line to the revenue from the homes along it, and on a long rural road that math rarely works. A co-op, owned by the people on that road, can accept a slower payback because its owners are also its customers. Some co-ops also used fiber to manage their own electric systems, which helped justify the cost.

Small telephone companies, municipal utilities and tribal governments did similar work. Their record shows that rural broadband is not a technical mystery. It is a financing problem, and patient public money paired with local, accountable builders has solved versions of it before.

The older program underneath

There is another piece of federal broadband policy that predates the 2021 law and keeps working in the background. The Universal Service Fund, paid for by charges on telephone service and passed through to customers, has for decades subsidized phone and internet service in rural and high-cost areas, along with connections for schools, libraries, rural health clinics and low-income households. It was challenged as an unconstitutional delegation of Congress's taxing power, and in 2025 the Supreme Court upheld it.

The fund faces a slower problem: it is paid for by a shrinking base of traditional phone revenue, while the services it supports have moved to the internet. Members of both parties have proposed changing how it is financed, for example by asking broadband providers or large technology platforms to contribute. Whatever the next Congress does about rural internet, the fund's future will be part of the conversation.

What we know and what we don't

As of late 2026, the honest picture is incomplete. States have been working through their revised plans under the new federal guidance, but the full results of BEAD will not be visible for years. How much of the money will go to fiber, how much to satellite, and whether any remaining funds will be used for other purposes are questions still being decided by agencies and states. Readers should treat any confident claim about the final outcome with caution.

What is clear is that the original promise of the 2021 law was bipartisan, and so is the frustration. Rural residents who heard their senators celebrate the vote in 2021 have, in many places, not yet seen a line in the ground. That is a failure of time and process as much as of any single administration. Big programs that require maps, challenges, competitions and federal approvals move slowly, and progressives who supported the original rules have to reckon with how much those rules added to the timeline.

One more uncertainty is worth naming plainly. Satellite service has improved quickly, and the companies offering it are expanding capacity, but the long-term price of that service for rural households, and whether public money will be used to keep it affordable, are open questions. The same is true of fiber built with public subsidy: a line in the ground does little for a family that cannot afford the monthly bill. That is why the end of the discount program matters as much as the fate of the building money. Access and affordability were written into the same law for a reason, and both halves now need attention.

The family at the end of the road

Picture a farmhouse in a county where the nearest town has a grocery store, a school and a feed supply. The kids do homework on a phone hotspot. The parents run a small business that depends on online orders. The local hospital has closed its maternity ward, so prenatal checkups happen over video when the connection allows. The family voted for different candidates than their neighbours in the county seat, and they are as tired as anyone of being promised things.

The 2021 law was written for that house. Whether it reaches it depends on decisions being made in state broadband offices, in the Commerce Department, and in the next Congress. The incoming Congress, sworn in on January 3, 2027, will have Democratic majorities and a Republican president, which means any change to broadband programs, including reviving a discount for low-income households, will again need both parties. That is how the original law passed.

What you can do

Broadband decisions are made at every level of government, so there is more than one place to push.

• Call the people who voted on it. The representatives page finds your U.S. representative and senators by address and shows their contact information and latest votes. Ask whether they support restoring a broadband discount for low-income households.
• Watch for rules open to comment. The public comment page lists federal rules open for comment, closing soonest first and grouped by issue, with guidance on how to write a comment. Telecommunications and broadband rules appear there when agencies propose them.
• See what both parties have done together. The common-ground tracker lists bills passed with support from both parties, including infrastructure measures.
• Keep up with the technology politics. The big tech and AI topic page gathers reporting on telecom, platforms and the companies competing for public broadband money.

The 69 senators who voted yes in August 2021 were right that a house without a connection is a house left behind. The job now is to make sure the money they voted for actually reaches the end of the road.