Trump signs executive order that lets companies more easily build broadband infrastructure on federal land and buildings, in effort to improve rural broadband
Context & Ripple Effects
In January 2018 the administration paired two moves aimed at rural connectivity: this order cutting federal-land permitting friction for broadband builders, and weeks-later groundwork that produced the October spectrum strategy memo and White House Spectrum Strategy Task Force. The order addressed the physical layer — where wires and towers can go — while the FCC handled the money side, funding access for more than 700,000 homes and businesses by August of that year via rural broadband subsidies with most recipients getting 100Mbps+.
That combination set the template for everything after: the FCC's $1.2B+ Rural Digital Opportunity Fund awards across 32 states from 23 telecom companies, successive USDA grant-and-loan rounds through 2023 including a ~$667M fourth tranche, and eventually a $42B flagship program whose leadership faced pressure to favor satellite over fiber builds. The 2025 episode, in which Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick urged civil servants to increase Starlink's role, shows the same question this order raised — who gets to build what, where, and with whose technology — still driving policy seven years on.
First-order effects
- Companies deploying rural broadband gain faster rights-of-way across federal land and buildings, directly lowering the permitting cost and timeline component of buildouts that the FCC was simultaneously subsidizing.
Second-order effects
- Lower siting costs change which technologies pencil out in rural areas, strengthening the case for the satellite and fixed-wireless approaches that later drew explicit federal preference when Lutnick pushed the $42B program toward Starlink.
Third-order effects
- If permit-easing plus targeted subsidy remains the playbook, federal land becomes a default infrastructure corridor and rural broadband policy consolidates around whoever can deploy fastest at the lowest regulatory cost — a structural tilt away from slow, capital-heavy fiber incumbency toward whichever delivery method wins administrative favor.
The trend: US rural broadband policy has evolved from pure subsidy disbursement into coordinated federal leverage over both the money and the right to build — culminating in vendor-level steering like the Starlink push.