While BEAD was first poised as a big build to create jobs, expand infrastructure and close the digital divide, it now leaves much of the broadband industry frustrated and uncertain. Following 2024’s funding waiting games, 2025 has seen overhauls, rewrites and fresh resubmissions pile up — creating a glaring bottleneck for the program’s building phase.
Short staffed and underfunded, state officers are already feeling the pressure to keep up with the most recent resubmissions — sometimes faced with less than 12 hours for turnarounds.
“Many builders had set plans and contracts in motion and even ramped up staff numbers in anticipation of awards,” said Johannes Maassen, founder of Collaborative Synergy — a company that helps broadband builders, utilities and state offices manage permitting and make-ready coordination to prevent early-stage delays.
“When the awards stalled and then required resubmission, those contracts didn't get executed, and staff increases were halted,” he told Broadband Nation.
The bottleneck in approvals doesn’t just slow paperwork — it sends shockwaves through permitting teams and field crews alike. Workflows for the people expected to deliver the build are upended, according to Maassen.
Field teams face everything from sudden schedule shifts and idle time to scattered work sites and pressured timelines. The chaos can erode efficiency and compromise the quality of the projects — not to mention pose safety risks for rushed workers in the field.
Caught in a loop, permitting teams face mounting revisions and rejections, and field crews are left waiting on approvals. The longer those delays stretch, the more pressure piles up.
“We are seeing some permitting contractors going dark or moving to other industries,” explained Maassen. And with many contractors moving on to other projects, “it may be hard to get a lot of the previously planned workforce back for BEAD,” further stressing the ongoing workforce shortage in the industry.
“That would mean more delays in getting infrastructure projects started,” he continued. “Soon, it feels as though the permitting departments and contractors will have to work double-time to get things done.”
Cost savings... at what cost?
Under the new administration’s “Benefit of the Bargain,” NTIA required states to conduct an additional bidding round to ensure the lowest-cost broadband option — a 180 from the original intent of long-term infrastructure investment.
“There are efforts to help streamline permitting and other processes to allow broadband to move more quickly, but it won’t change the process of time-consuming rejections of incorrect applications impeding the process,” said Maassen. Recent rejections are already taking tolls on permitting and build phases — which rely on getting “things done right the first time as often as possible to prevent delays.” He noted that requires very specific and accurate information reporting.
“When rejections occur, it can restart the clock, and those delays cost time, energy and money,” Maassen explained — an ironically steep price in the push for speed and cost savings.
The combo is also a recipe for more errors, according to Maassen. “It’s difficult to do things both fast and without mistakes,” he argued.
For permitting, it can mean overworked teams and higher turnover, creating even bigger stalls in the process as teams stretch thin. And for workers in the field, mistakes can cost more than delays and money, as buildouts of the past have shown.
When tower building boomed during the LTE era, many tower technicians were overextended — tasked with too much work and too little training in a lean subcontracting ecosystem — leading to serious injuries and even fatal falls.
The new focus of speed for BEAD has already sparked concern over its impacts on field workers, as the investments shift away from hiring practices provisioned in the original program.
At the same time, BEAD’s shift from fiber towards wireless could put more weight on the tower builders. These subcontractors are already feeling the squeeze of a monopsony — a market so lopsided it’s pushing many subcontractors out of the industry. And permitting is now facing a similar challenge of exiting contractors, as Maassen detailed.
While states have struggled with adjusting plans away from fiber, Maassen warns that short-term speed and cost savings should not come at the expense of reliable, long-term infrastructure.
“Fiber still makes the most sense in terms of scalability and future proofing. Picking the wrong technology to save permitting time and effort isn’t a good long-term strategy for broadband, or any other project,” Maassen contended. “The urgency of wanting to start projects will likely increase errors on applications."
Maassen acknowledged the opportunity to greenlight some projects with hybrid infrastructure but maintained that “the benefit of the bargain should not be overused as a cost-cutting measure.”