It’s time for Governor DeWine to stand up for his administration’s own Digital Opportunity Plan.

On May 8, Donald Trump posted a Truth Social rant condemning the Digital Equity Act as “UNCONSTITUTIONAL… RACIST and ILLEGAL”, The following evening, the U.S. Commerce Department began notifying state broadband offices that their Digital Equity Capacity Grants, totalling more than $800 million, had been peremptorily cancelled.

States and territories had received these grants on a formula basis mandated by the 2021 infrastructure act, which appropriated the funds.  Each state had spent two to three years developing and submitting a detailed plan for spending its allocation. Most if not all had signed grant agreements with the Commerce Department. Their varied digital equity (or “digital opportunity”) initiatives — digital navigators, community training programs, device assistance, workforce training, rural telehealth support — were teed up and ready to proceed.

Then, overnight, they weren’t.

That was nineteen weeks ago. I wrote at the time:

With $1.4 billion in Digital Equity Capacity Grants for states and territories at stake, not to mention more than $600 million in already-announced Digital Equity Competitive Grants involving hundreds of communities, the White House’s attempt to cancel the Digital Equity Act is certainly headed for court.

There’s also likely to be significant pushback from Congress — possibly from both sides of the aisle. (How will Senator Murkowski react to Alaska’s loss of $30 million in Competitive Grant awards? What can we expect from Senator Husted, who as Lieutenant Governor was the public face of BroadbandOhio until a few months ago?)

Boy, did I get that wrong.

Yes, a handful of Democratic Senators used Arielle Roth’s confirmation hearings to politely push  the incoming chief of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration — which “owns” the DEA programs — for a promise to revive Digital Equity Act funding. (Roth, about to go to work for Trump and Lutnick, artfully evaded.) Also, several state Congressional delegations have sent stern letters to Commerce Secretary Lutnick.  In a former life, mild-mannered efforts like these might have had some effect.  Not any more.

But strikingly, not a single state — Blue or Red — has yet gone to court to try to recover its lost DEA money.

Where this leaves Ohioans 

Ohio’s state broadband office, like its counterparts in many states, now finds itself with an official “Ohio Digital Opportunity Plan” but zero funding to carry it out.

BroadbandOhio still has its Ohio Digital Inclusion Grant Program featured on its website, even though it’s suspended for lack of funding. About half of Ohio’s DEA Capacity Grant was earmarked for local ODIGP grants around the state.  The deadline for an initial round of proposals was April 11; the state has them in hand.  All that’s missing to move forward with awards is the money.

There’s never been any chance that Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost would cross the Trump regime by suing to recover the BroadbandOhio’s $24 million Digital Equity Capacity Grant.  But Ohio’s community digital inclusion programs once could cling to a thin hope that legal action by other states might result in the return of Ohio’s money.  After nineteen weeks, that hope has faded from thin to nonexistent.

If Ohio’s Governor and AG won’t put up a fight with the White House to recover the Federal DEA funding that was supposed to launch the state’s Digital Opportunity Plan, then Plan B should be obvious: Governor DeWine needs to find $24 million to replace it.

Leftover BEAD funding

This could be less difficult than it sounds.  BroadbandOhio just submitted its “final proposal” to the Commerce Department for using $973 million in Federal  rural broadband funds from BEAD, the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment Program. For a variety of reasons Ohio has only proposed to spend $277 million on BEAD’s main purpose, i.e. subsidizing the deployment of physical broadband infrastructure where it’s needed to make 100/20 Mbps Internet available to rural homes that can’t get it now.  That total may change before the Commerce Dept approves Ohio’s plan, but the final result will almost certainly leave at least $600 million of Ohio’s BEAD allocation unspent.

Under the law that created BEAD, those leftover funds are supposed to be available to the state to spend on lower-priority broadband initiatives.  Permissible uses include improving connectivity for community anchor institutions, data and mapping, providing reduced-cost broadband for tenants in low-income multi-family buildings, and “subgrants for… broadband adoption, including programs to provide affordable internet-capable devices.” The last category would cover most of the activities proposed in Ohio’s Digital Opportunity Plan.

Of course Lutnick and Trump don’t intend to let the states use their BEAD allocations as the law provides.  In June, Lutnick issued new BEAD rules that, among other things, declared that “Funding for allowable non-deployment purposes is under review” and rescinded all prior approvals of state plans to non-deployment spending. It’s obvious that the Commerce Secretary plans to claw back as much BEAD money from the states as he can.  It’s equally obvious that his planned clawback will violate the law that created BEAD, which explicitly authorizes states to use funds not spent on deployment to support broadband access in other ways.

Ohio’s Governor and Attorney-General haven’t been willing to fight for $24 million in Digital Equity Act money.  Are they more likely to push back against the loss of hundreds of millions of dollars in BEAD funding? Only time will tell.  But that’s one straightforward way for DeWine to secure replacement funding for the state’s Digital Opportunity Plan: Challenge or persuade the national leaders of his own party to follow the law on BEAD non-deployment funds.

If BroadbandOhio managed to keep even a fraction of its remaining BEAD allocation for non-deployment initiatives, its ODOP funding problem could be solved.

DeWine can find the money

Or, failing that… the Governor can simply look to the state’s own resources.

DeWine recently signed off on a $203 billion biennial state operating budget, of which $149 billion is non-Federal dollars.  $24 million amounts to a trivial  .012% of the total operating budget, or .016% of the non-Federal portion.

Also, this is a state whose leaders just managed to find $600 million in the couch cushions to subsidize a single professional football stadium.

One way or another, Governor DeWine has the ability to find $24 million to follow through on his own administration’s very modest plan to reduce Ohio’s digital divide.

BEAD won’t close Ohio’s digital divide

Counting the $277 million in the state’s just-announced BEAD Final Proposal, Federal and state commitments to rural broadband infrastructure subsidies in Ohio since 2020 now total between $750 and $800 million.  Once that money has all been spent, between 350,000 and 400,000 Ohio residences are supposed to have options to subscribe to high-speed Internet service that they didn’t have before. Almost all of those residences are in rural or rural-suburban communities. Many politicians and some media will tell us this is the end of Ohio’s digital divide.

But the U.S. Census’ 2024 America Community Survey data, just released yesterday, shows almost 1.2 million Ohio households without wireline broadband subscriptions (DSL, cable or fiber) at any speed last year — 806,000 in urban areas vs. 367,000 in rural areas of the state.  So even if all that spending on rural connectivity succeeds, there will likely be between 900,000 and a million Ohio households, mostly in urban areas, who still don’t have home broadband service other than (maybe) a smartphone. Their lack of connection isn’t the result of gaps in broadband infrastructure.  We know from research and experience that it has a number of causes, but two of the most important are the cost of service (poorer households are far more likely to be unconnected than richer ones) and lack of digital skills.

The new ACS data also shows 1.1 million Ohio households without desktop or laptop computers in 2024, with an even greater share in urban areas — 844,000  urban vs.  266,000 rural.

Helping unconnected urban and rural Ohioans find affordable Internet options, learn digital skills, and get affordable, reliable home computers are exactly what the Ohio Digital Opportunity Plan is meant to accomplish.

The Digital Equity Act funding may be gone, but Ohio’s carefully developed plan remains, along with the persistent digital divide it aims to reduce for a million urban and rural households.

Governor DeWine owes it to those households to stand up and make sure the Ohio Digital Opportunity Plan — his BroadbandOhio’s plan — gets the funding it needs to proceed.