A federal broadband grant can make service available at a home before anyone there starts using it. The Senate committee’s revised version of the Accelerating Broadband Permits Act of 2026 would require a public dashboard to count locations where grant-funded service is available. The Nov. 9 committee substitute leaves out a second count that appeared in the April 30 bill: how many of those locations actually used the service.
The Senate Commerce Committee reported the substitute on Nov. 9, and S. 4448 appears as item 691 on the Senate calendar. The proposed dashboard would track how much of its Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) grant each eligible recipient had spent and how many locations gained access through that funding. The dashboard requirement calls for counts, so readers could follow a grant recipient’s progress while still needing another source to check whether they can order service at a particular address. The substitute would also require the Commerce Department to post recipients’ semiannual reports within 90 days of receiving them, with confidential business information removed. Existing law already requires those reports to count both locations where service became available and locations that used it. Under the substitute, readers could look to those published reports for usage figures where disclosed.
The bill addresses another point in a network build: getting permission to use federal property. Current law already gives an executive agency 270 days after receiving a duly filed application for an easement, right-of-way, or lease on federal property under the statute to grant or deny it and notify the applicant. The reported bill would give the Commerce Department 120 days from enactment to develop data controls for tracking processing times and set up alerts for staff when an application risks missing that existing deadline.
For someone waiting for broadband, those records would answer different questions. A permit tracker would help a grant recipient see where a project stands in the federal process. A dashboard count would show how many locations gained access through the grant. The semiannual reports already count how many of those locations used the service. The bill would make the reports public with confidential business information removed.