Senate shops bill to restructure, fund USDA’s rural broadband program through 2030

The Senate last week began considering a bill that would restructure and fund the Department of Agriculture’s ReConnect Loan and Grant Program with $650 million per year, through 2030, for rural broadband expansion.

The ReConnecting Rural America Act would reauthorize and strengthen the USDA’s ReConnect program, an application-based grant funding program launched in 2018. Introduced by Sen. Peter Welch, a Vermont Democrat, and Sen. Roger Marshall, a Kansas Republican, the bill would make other changes to the program, including prioritizing funding applications for areas where at least 90% of homes lack access to broadband. It would also establish a symmetrical performance standard of 100 megabits per second, for upload and download speeds, for projects funded under the program.

The bill also adds clarity to the program’s statutory language, explicitly granting the USDA the authority to award grants, loans or grant-loan combinations under the program. It clarifies that Communications Union Districts, the municipal organizations of two or more towns that share the responsibility of building and managing communications infrastructures, are eligible entities under ReConnect.

The program was created with a budget of $600 million for grants in 2018, and it’s been refunded a number of times via Congressional appropriations, notably receiving $2 billion from the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act passed in 2021. Last year’s funding round made $700 million available in loans and grants for expanding broadband networks to unserved and underserved rural areas.

While the amount of federal dollars allotted in the Senate’s bill is $50 million lower than the previous year, a number of experts and reports have pointed out that concurrent broadband programs — such as the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment program, and projects funded via the American Rescue Plan or the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund — have resulted in a drop in unserved and underserved rural areas.

In a joint news release, the senators noted that an analysis from the Benton Institute for Broadband and Society of the FCC’s 2024 Communications Marketplace Report found that more than one third of Americans either lack access to one broadband provider or have access to none at all. Another FCC report found that more than 45 million Americans lack access to fixed terrestrial 100/20 Mbps broadband, the commission’s definition of broadband, and that many of these residents live in rural areas.

“Just as the great Kansan President Eisenhower understood the importance of investing in our nation’s highways in the 1950s, we must invest in the critical highway of our time: reliable, high-speed internet,” Marshall said in the release. “Broadband isn’t a luxury – it’s essential for our way of life. From family farms to schools to small businesses, rural communities depend on connectivity now more than ever. The ReConnecting Rural America Act will help bring rural Kansas up to speed, and I am proud to work with Senator Welch to reintroduce this important legislation.”