NTIA plans to restore some Digital Equity Act funding after court battle over Trump cancellation

Following several months of litigation between the Trump administration and the National Digital Inclusion Alliance, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration said it plans to restore some of the funding from the Digital Equity Act, according to a joint status report filed Monday.

In the report, the NTIA said it was preparing a new Notice of Funding Opportunity, and said it had proposed a target date of December to reopen the applications for the $1.25 billion Digital Equity Competitive Grant Program, one of three programs created by the Digital Equity Act. The digital inclusion nonprofit brought the case brought against the federal government last October after President Donald Trump cancelled the Digital Equity Act and froze funding for all three programs, in May of 2025, despite millions in grant dollars already having been awarded.

Though it should have taken an act of Congress to overturn the act, Trump announced the program’s cancellation via on his Truth Social platform, calling it a “giveaway” based on race. The Digital Equity Act, created under former President Joe Biden in 2021 as part of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, was set to deliver $2.75 billion to state and local governments through through its three grant programs: the State Digital Equity Planning Grant Program, the State Digital Equity Capacity Grant Program and the Digital Equity Competitive Grant Program.

All three were intended to fund digital skills training, workforce readiness, device access and technical support for residents at the state and local level. Along with the $42.45 billion Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment program and several other internet funding programs, the Digital Equity Act was a core part of the Biden administration’s “Internet for All” agenda.

The National Digital Inclusion Alliance, which was originally slated to receive nearly $25.7 million through the act to continue its work in expanding internet and device access, sued specifically seeking the restoration of the Competitive Grant Program. In early July, the court handed the alliance and digital equity practitioners a partial victory, ruling that the administration couldn’t outright terminate the program. Angela Siefer, the NDIA’s executive director, told StateScoop on Tuesday that the NTIA’s plans to release a new NOFO was a continuation of that victory.

Siefer said the victory, though, is being met with a “tempered happiness” from digital equity leaders. As part of that early July ruling, the court ordered that “members of minorities and ethnic populations” be removed as one of the program’s covered populations, which were groups legally codified to be prioritized for digital equity planning and grant funding. They were defined in the act as groups that had historically experienced lower rates of internet access, device ownership, digital literacy or technology adoption.

“We are very disappointed in that piece of it, because, in our country, we’ve had minorities and ethnic populations get excluded pretty regularly for hundreds of years, and the intention of having them listed as a covered population was to make sure they don’t get excluded again,” Siefer said in an interview. “It is just more whitewashing of our country’s history and pretending like racism doesn’t occur, which is very sad. It’s very disappointing. It’s very frustrating.”

The joint report said that both the federal government and the NDIA have until Aug. 17 to reach an agreement on how to move forward. While Siefer said the alliance is considering the NTIA’s December proposal, the funding is urgently needed, not only for residents who stand to benefit, but also for local organizations that hired staff, expanded operations and invested in their capacity in anticipation of receiving grants that never arrived.

“The impact on those communities, I think, is really clear. It’s grandma getting scammed. It’s veterans not being able to talk to their doctors. It’s someone who just lost a job not being able to apply for another one, right? Like these are these are real consequences, and the impact on the organizations is that many of them, including NDIA, needed to reduce the size of our teams. We had to lay people off,” she said.

Drew Garner, director of policy engagement at the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society, said that while his organization — which filed a amicus brief to the court in support of the NDIA’s case — was “cautiously optimistic” about the news of the funding’s restoration, Benton, too, was disappointed about the removal of “members of minorities and ethnic populations” from the act’s covered populations.

Garner said that although there is enough overlap from other covered populations — such as low-income households, those facing language barriers and the elderly — that minority groups and ethnic populations may find incidental benefit, the administration’s history with these types of programs has not exactly been stellar.

“We believe this is a very important program, but just the administration’s track record when it comes to anything that has to do with broadband adoption and affordability — the administration’s track record has been pretty poor,” Garner said. “We’ve seen this in the BEAD program. We’ve seen it with how they treat and speak about the non-deployment program. We’ve seen that with how they talk about the Digital Equity Act and some of the other social service programs that they’ve cut. We are concerned that they may try to narrow or make these funds a little bit harder to access, or narrow the scope of how they can be used.”

But, he said, the potential funding restoration would offer a “lifeline at what I’d say is one of the most critical times for many of these digital equity practitioners” who are facing budget shortfalls and uncertainty — and as money for broadband expansion through BEAD also rolls out to states through the end of the year.

“A lot of these existing broadband adoption, digital equity efforts are facing a fiscal cliff in 2026,” Garner said. “We’re going to be losing those right at the time BEAD is rolling out, so we’ll be connecting a lot of new households at the very moment we’re contracting the adoption of digital skills and online safety efforts, so that’s that’s that’s exactly the opposite of how we would want good policy to sort of work.

“We want the Digital Equity Act to be rolling out at the same time we’re connecting these new households. We want to promote device availability and digital skills and safe, effective use of the internet as we’re connecting new households. Right now, unless if they don’t restore the Digital Equity Act, that’s the course we’re on now.”