Has Biden’s $42B broadband equity program connected no one to the internet?

Claim:

The administration of former U.S. President Joe Biden spent $42.45 billion on the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment program that has connected no one to the internet.

Rating:

Context

While the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment program hadn’t connected anyone to the internet yet as of November 2025, it was expected to begin doing so within the next year.

In October 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump began the demolition of the White House’s East Wing to make room for the privately funded ballroom that Trump estimated would cost about $300 million. Critics of the planned ballroom only grew louder then, which prompted the White House to respond to what it called “the latest instance of manufactured outrage.”

Some of his supporters took to social media to criticize former-President Joe Biden’s spending. One X post (archived) from October 2025 claimed that the Biden administration spent $42.45 billion on the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) program that connected no one to the internet. The full text of the post said:

The Biden Administration spent $42.45 billion on the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment program. 

Kamala was in charge. 

It connected 0 people to the internet. 

But tell me more about President Trump’s ballroom…

The claim spread to other social media platforms, like Threads (archived), and even persisted (archived) into the following month. Snopes readers searched the site in November, wondering if the claim was true.

The post was correct in saying the Biden administration allocated $42.45 billion to states for the BEAD program and that it had connected no one to the internet as of November 2025. However, BEAD was planned as a years-long process that federal and state governments have been slowly working on over several years and is expected to begin connecting people to the internet within the next year. Although it began under the Biden administration, the Trump administration is continuing to oversee the BEAD program.

The BEAD program is a $42.45 billion federal grant program for U.S. states and territories to develop plans for deployment of high-speed internet infrastructure to support homes and communities, often rural, currently without access to such internet and to then deploy those infrastructure upgrades, according to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). In 2021, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act directed the U.S. Department of Commerce to establish and administer the BEAD program. In 2023, the White House announced it had allocated BEAD funding to all 50 states, the District of Columbia and all five U.S. territories.

The allocation of funds, however, did not mark the point states were supposed to “put shovels in the ground” — a phrase often used to refer to the start of construction on a project. States still had to submit initial proposals, the first of which weren’t approved until April 2024, and then had to submit final proposals. Prior to the federal government’s approval of the final proposal, a state could only access 20% of the allocated funding. The final 80% would only be released to a state once it had that final approval.

More steps were added to this process in June 2025, when the Trump administration made changes to the BEAD program. For example, states then had to issue corrections to their initial proposals to account for the Trump administration’s changes to the program. Those changes came after the Trump administration noted that “the program has not connected a single person to the internet and is in dire need of a readjustment” when it first announced the planned changes in March.

The Trump administration’s changes to the Biden administration’s BEAD program reflected the two sides of a debate that erupted in the last few years over the program’s slow rollout, delays and how it should be administered.

When U.S. Senate Majority Leader John Thune from South Dakota wrote an opinion piece on his website about “Fixing Biden’s Broken Broadband Program” in April 2025, he also noted that by that date BEAD had “not connected a single household to the internet.”

The reason it hadn’t connected anyone to the internet, Thune wrote, was because “the Biden administration chose to load up this program with a slew of extraneous conditions that made it unworkable for many providers. The program’s requirements read like a progressive wish-list, and they bear little resemblance to what Congress envisioned for this program.”

Thune specifically called out climate mandates, labor and employment requirements, prioritization of government-owned networks over private networks and rate regulations. The Trump administration said it cut all of those things from the BEAD program when it changed it.

As of Nov. 18, 2025, the program still hadn’t connected anyone to the internet, a fact Democrats have used while criticizing the Trump administration’s changes to BEAD.

“Republicans spent years demonizing the Biden Administration for the time it took to carefully execute a massive, highly prescriptive broadband program to connect all Americans to affordable, reliable, high speed internet,” Rep. Frank Pallone, Jr., D-N.J., said in remarks to the House of Representatives on Nov. 18, 2025. “Now, almost a year later, Republicans have not connected a single household to high-speed internet.” Pallone accused the Trump administration of delaying BEAD’s rollout by forcing states to rewrite and resubmit proposals after making changes to the program.

In an interview with Mountain State Spotlight, a West Virginia-based nonprofit newsroom, Evan Feinman, who led BEAD during the Biden administration, argued that BEAD never included any labor or climate requirements in the first place.

“We did use the word climate, but it had nothing to do with climate change. It was about the weather,” Feinman told Mountain State Spotlight. The example he used was of putting a whole network on telephone poles in Florida, a hurricane coming in and knocking them all down and the need to rebuild the whole network in such a scenario. “Instead, we said, we want to see that you’re being smart about when you bury stuff and when you don’t, and that you’ve taken into account wildfires in the West and icy weather in the North,” Feinman added.

The Biden administration, at least by May 2024, anticipated that BEAD would take about this long before connecting households to the internet. In an exchange with U.S. Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks, R-Iowa, the then-head of the NTIA, Alan Davidson, said he expected “shovels in the ground” in 2025 or 2026. He admitted that the NTIA would have liked to see BEAD make progress faster than it was while also defending the multi-year effort as a “long-term program.”

On Nov. 18, the same date as Pallone’s remarks, the NTIA announced its approval of 18 final proposals from 15 states and three territories. The timelines offered by these states suggested the program might start connecting people to the internet between 2025 and 2026, as Davidson expected. For example, Virginia predicted it will begin construction of broadband infrastructure in 2026. Officials from Louisiana said on Nov. 18 that the state “can shift from planning to putting shovels in the ground in the next several weeks.”

So the program should begin to connect people to the internet soon.