The Trump administration said it will reinstate a broadband grant program to comply with a court ruling that prevented it from fully ignoring the Digital Equity Act enacted by Congress in 2021. The US government said in a court filing that it plans to start taking applications for grants in December.
However, the Trump administration won a partial victory because the judge ruled the government can’t allocate money based on the race or ethnicity of people who would benefit from grants. The government program can still award broadband grants based on factors such as income, age, and disability.
The Digital Equity Act of 2021 provided $2.75 billion for three grant programs aimed at closing gaps in broadband access. The Biden administration started awarding $60 million in planning grants to states in 2022, and in 2024 it started taking applications to distribute the rest of the $2.75 billion. Trump announced in May 2025 that he would end the grant programs, claiming the Digital Equity Act itself is racist and unconstitutional.
Trump and federal government officials were sued in US District Court for the District of Columbia by the National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA), an advocacy group that was in line to obtain $25.7 million in grant money before the Trump administration ended the program. The NDIA lawsuit is specifically about the Digital Equity Competitive Grant Program, which accounts for $1.25 billion of the total authorized by the Digital Equity Act.
A separate grant program for states and territories accounted for the other $1.44 billion, but there’s no indication that it will be restarted. It doesn’t appear that anyone sued the Trump administration over the discontinued state grants.
The NDIA called the revival of the Digital Equity Competitive Grant Program “a massive win for the communities we serve,” though it would have to submit a new application for funding because the Trump administration is starting the process from scratch. In January 2025, the Biden administration selected the NDIA for a $25.7 million grant to provide low- and no-cost devices and assist people in accessing low-cost broadband. The Trump administration later terminated the grant, the NDIA lawsuit said.
The Trump administration confirmed in a joint status report yesterday that it will reinstate the Digital Equity Competitive Grant Program, but without the provision that uses race and ethnicity as criteria for awarding funds. The status report did not mention restoring the $1.44 billion program for states, which was not part of the lawsuit filed by the NDIA.
“The Digital Equity Act is the first major federal investment to acknowledge that true connectivity requires more than just laying fiber-optic cables,” the NDIA said. “It takes digital navigators, affordable devices, and localized digital skills training to ensure that historically underserved communities can fully participate in our modern economy. The Competitive Grant Program is designed to directly fund these community-level solutions.”
The NDIA is, of course, not happy about the judge’s decision that grants cannot be targeted to racial and ethnic minorities. “Regrettably, however, the court’s ruling also severed the inclusion of racial and ethnic minorities as a specific covered population in the program on the grounds that it is unconstitutional,” the NDIA said. “NDIA maintains unequivocally that the Digital Equity Act is constitutional in its entirety, and that the administration’s aggressive actions to dismantle it are unjust.”
Judge John Bates, a George W. Bush appointee, ruled last month that “the Digital Equity Act straightforwardly categorizes members of certain races as ‘covered’ by the Act and targets grant money to programs that benefit those groups. That is an explicit racial classification, which can only be upheld if it withstands strict scrutiny. Here, it does not: the offending provision is neither justified by a compelling governmental interest nor narrowly tailored to meet a permissible goal. Accordingly, it is unconstitutional.”
Bates did not overturn the whole law, saying “the offending provision is severable from the rest of the statute” and that “the government’s only objection to the Digital Equity Act is this singular unconstitutional provision.” Although Trump had ordered an end to the whole program, the government told the court in June that it would be willing to “administer the Competitive Grant Program applying the statute’s race-neutral criteria.”
The National Telecommunications and Information Administration is now preparing a new Notice of Funding Opportunity for the competitive grant program and intends to start accepting applications in December, the joint status report said. The NDIA could object to the government’s proposed timeline, but is still evaluating it and asked the court for another two weeks to determine whether the sides can reach an “agreement on the path forward and proposed schedule.”
The Digital Equity Act directed the US to establish a Competitive Grant Program to “spur greater adoption of broadband among covered populations.” The law defined eight types of covered populations, including “individuals who are members of a racial or ethnic minority group.”
The racial and ethnic minority category will be eliminated from the program as a result of the judge’s ruling, but the other categories remain. This includes people in low-income households, people who are 60 or older, incarcerated people except those in federal correctional facilities, veterans, people with disabilities, people with language barriers, and people living in rural areas.
NDIA Executive Director Angela Siefer said it is too early to determine whether her group will apply for a grant when the government starts taking applications. She said the NDIA will need to examine the Notice of Funding Opportunity to be issued by the Trump administration.
Siefer said the NDIA proposal that won a grant from the Biden administration “was carefully crafted” and would have served 30,000 people in rural, urban and tribal communities. “NDIA’s vision is for everyone to have the opportunity to use technology to live, learn, work, and thrive. This is not controversial,” she said.
Siefer also said the government should bring back the state grants even though they weren’t part of the NDIA lawsuit. Plans developed by US states during the Biden administration “are ready to be implemented,” Siefer told Ars.
The Digital Equity Act was approved by Congress at the same time as the $42.45 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program, which gives money to states to provide subsidies for Internet providers that deploy broadband in unserved and underserved areas. The Trump administration didn’t scrap BEAD, but it delayed the grants and overhauled the program.
The Trump administration cut spending on broadband deployment to about $21 billion, told states not to require low prices or compliance with net neutrality rules, and helped Starlink obtain more funding than it originally was going to get. The administration hasn’t revealed what it will do with the other $21 billion yet.
