Court Forces Trump to Revive Broadband Grant Programme He Tried to Kill
The Trump administration has been forced to reinstate part of a federal broadband grant programme after a court ruled it couldn't simply ignore an act of Congress. A filing confirmed the government plans to reopen applications under the Digital Equity Competitive Grant Programme by December. Partial victory for Trump, partial defeat. Pick your spin.
The backstory: the Digital Equity Act of 2021 authorised $2.75 billion across three programmes aimed at closing broadband access gaps. The Biden administration began distributing planning grants to states in 2022, and by 2024 was processing the bulk of the remaining funds. Trump declared the whole thing racist and unconstitutional in May 2025 and axed it.
The National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA), an advocacy group that had been awarded $25.7 million under the Biden administration before the grant was pulled, sued the Trump administration in DC District Court. Their case focused specifically on the $1.25 billion Competitive Grant Programme.
Judge John Bates, a George W. Bush appointee, ruled that while Trump couldn't kill the entire programme, he did find one provision unconstitutional. The Act had listed racial and ethnic minorities as a specific covered population for grant targeting. Bates found this failed strict scrutiny under the Equal Protection clause and struck it out. The rest of the law, he said, was fine and must stand.
The government had already telegraphed it would accept this outcome, telling the court in June it was willing to run the programme using race-neutral criteria. Now it has to follow through.
The other seven covered populations remain intact: people in low-income households, people aged 60 and over, incarcerated individuals outside federal facilities, veterans, people with disabilities, those facing language barriers, and people in rural areas. Grants can still be targeted on those bases. Just not race.
The NDIA called the ruling a 'massive win' while simultaneously complaining about it. Fair enough, given they won the main battle but lost a component they considered essential. Executive Director Angela Siefer said her organisation's original proposal would have served 30,000 people across rural, urban, and tribal communities, and that they would need to review the new Notice of Funding Opportunity before deciding whether to apply again.
Siefer also made the obvious point that the $1.44 billion state grant programme, which wasn't part of the NDIA lawsuit, remains dead. Nobody sued over that one, so it stays buried. State-level digital equity plans developed during the Biden era are, apparently, ready to go. They're just sitting on a shelf.
This all sits alongside the broader wreckage of Trump's broadband agenda. The $42.45 billion BEAD programme, which funds infrastructure deployment rather than digital inclusion, wasn't scrapped but has been gutted and delayed. Total spending was trimmed to around $21 billion, net neutrality requirements were stripped from state conditions, and Starlink was quietly manoeuvred into a larger slice of the pie. What happens to the remaining $21 billion is anyone's guess.
So: one grant programme partially restored by court order, another $1.44 billion still cancelled, and a broader infrastructure programme overhauled in ways that mostly benefit one well-connected satellite operator. Quite the digital equity record.