The bill
Enhancing Administrative Reviews for Broadband Deployment Act
HR. 5419, 119th Congress — read as touching Telecommunications.
Sponsored by
Rep. Kean, Thomas H. [R-NJ-7]
ID: K000398
Follow the money
The bill
HR. 5419, 119th Congress — read as touching Telecommunications.
The sponsor
Every bill has someone who introduced it. That name is where the paper trail starts.
The money
22 itemised contributions to this sponsor, pulled from FEC filings.
The alignment
This bill's text tracks the "Introduction" section, p. 888-890 of the Mandate for Leadership.
Track this bill's progress through the legislative process
Latest Action
Received in the Senate and Read twice and referred to the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.
March 3, 2026
📍 Current Status
Next: Both chambers must agree on the same version of the bill.
1. Introduction: A member of Congress introduces a bill in either the House or Senate.
2. Committee Review: The bill is sent to relevant committees for study, hearings, and revisions.
3. Floor Action: If approved by committee, the bill goes to the full chamber for debate and voting.
4. Other Chamber: If passed, the bill moves to the other chamber (House or Senate) for the same process.
5. Conference: If both chambers pass different versions, a conference committee reconciles the differences.
6. Presidential Action: The President can sign the bill into law, veto it, or take no action.
7. Became Law: If signed (or if Congress overrides a veto), the bill becomes law!
Another masterpiece of legislative theater, folks! Let's dissect this farce and see what's really going on.
**Main Purpose & Objectives:** The bill's title is a mouthful, but the real purpose is to grease the wheels for broadband deployment by streamlining the review process for land use authorizations. In other words, it's a gift to telecom companies, wrapped in a bow of bureaucratic efficiency.
**Key Provisions & Changes to Existing Law:** The bill requires the Secretaries of Interior and Agriculture to conduct a study (because we all know how effective those are) to identify barriers to timely review of broadband land use authorizations. They'll then submit a report with recommendations for improving efficiency, including staffing plans. Oh boy, can't wait to see the thrilling results of this exercise in bureaucratic navel-gazing.
**Affected Parties & Stakeholders:** Telecom companies will love this bill, as it paves the way for faster deployment of their infrastructure. The Secretaries of Interior and Agriculture get to pretend they're doing something important while actually just rubber-stamping industry demands. Environmental groups might raise some token objections, but let's be real, they'll be steamrolled by the lobbying machine.
**Potential Impact & Implications:** This bill is a Trojan horse for telecom companies to expand their reach without proper oversight. By "streamlining" the review process, we're essentially giving them carte blanche to build wherever they please, with minimal environmental or community impact assessments. It's a classic case of regulatory capture, where industry interests are prioritized over public concerns.
In medical terms, this bill is like prescribing a patient a placebo while ignoring the underlying disease. The symptoms might look better for a hot second, but the real problem – corporate influence and lack of accountability – remains untreated.
Diagnosis: Legislative Theater-itis, with symptoms including bureaucratic doublespeak, industry favoritism, and a healthy dose of regulatory capture. Treatment: a strong dose of transparency, public scrutiny, and actual oversight. But let's be real, that's not going to happen anytime soon.
Rep. Kean, Thomas H. [R-NJ-7]
Congress 119 • 2024 Election Cycle
No PAC contributions found
No committee contributions found
Hub layout: Politicians in center, donors arranged by type in rings around them.
Showing 42 nodes and 22 connections (45 secondary connections hidden)
Total contributions: $83,100
Showing top 18 donors by contribution amount
Which industries are materially affected by specific provisions in this bill. 2 helped.
Section 2(a)(1) directs Secretaries to study barriers and improve efficiency for reviewing broadband land use authorizations, which would benefit telecommunications companies seeking to deploy broadband infrastructure on public lands and National Forest System land.
Section 2(a)(1) aims to improve efficiency of reviewing broadband land use authorizations, which would facilitate construction of communications facilities on covered lands, benefiting construction and engineering firms involved in broadband deployment.
For each industry this bill affects, here's what the sponsor (Rep. Kean, Thomas H. [R-NJ-7])received from donors associated with that industry during the 2022–present cycles. Donations are not proof of intent — they are a record of who funds the people writing the law.
This bill shows semantic similarity to the following sections of the Project 2025 policy document.
— 856 — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise Administration gave the green light for recipients to spend those funds to overbuild existing high-speed networks in communities that already have multiple broadband providers. A new Administration should eliminate government-funded overbuilding of existing networks. l Adopt a national coordinating strategy. Hundreds of billions of infrastructure dollars have been appropriated by Congress or budgeted by agencies over the past couple of years that can be used to end the digital divide. Yet, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office, “U.S. broadband efforts are not guided by a national strategy”; instead, “[f]ederal broadband efforts are fragmented and overlapping, with more than 100 programs administered by 15 agencies,” risking overbuilding as well as wasteful duplication.26 Many of these programs remain plagued by inefficiency, further contributing to waste of limited taxpayer dollars. Moreover, the federal government is failing to put appropriate guardrails in place to govern the expenditure of billions in broadband funds. This is the regulatory equivalent of turning the spigot on full blast and then walking away from the hose. There is a worrisome lack of adequate tracking, measurement, and accountability standards governing all of this broadband spending. As a result, we are likely to see headline levels of waste, fraud, and abuse. A new Administration needs to bring fresh oversight to this spending and put a national strategy in place to ensure that the federal government adopts a coordinated approach to its various broadband initiatives. Similarly, the next Administration should ask the FCC to launch a review of its existing broadband programs, including the different components of the USF, with the goal of avoiding duplication, improving efficiency of existing programs, and saving taxpayer money. l Correct the FCC’s regulatory trajectory and encourage competition to improve connectivity. The FCC is a New Deal–era agency. Its history of regulation tends to reflect the view that the federal government should impose heavy-handed regulation rather than relying on competition and market forces to produce optimal outcomes. President Franklin D. Roosevelt recommended that Congress create the FCC in February 1934 for the purposes of establishing “a single Government agency charged with broad authority” over the field of communications.27 Congress subsequently established the FCC through the Communications Act of 1934. Congress has passed a number of additional statutes—some broad, some — 857 — Federal Communications Commission narrow—that pertain to the FCC’s authority, including most significantly the Telecommunications Act of 1996,28 which opened up markets for greater competition and largely deregulated industry segments. Technological change in the connectivity sector is occurring rapidly. We are now seeing an unprecedented level of convergence, innovation, and competition in the market for connectivity. On the one hand, traditional cable providers like Charter are now offering mobile wireless services to consumers in direct competition with traditional wireless companies like Verizon. On the other hand, a new generation of low-earth orbit satellite services like StarLink and Amazon’s Project Kuiper stand to offer high- speed home broadband in competition with legacy providers. Furthermore, broadcasters are offering high-speed downloads directly to consumers over spectrum that previously provided only TV service. These rapidly evolving market conditions counsel in favor of eliminating many of the heavy-handed FCC regulations that were adopted in an era when every technology operated in a silo. These include many of the FCC’s media ownership rules, which can have the effect of restricting investment and competition because those regulations assume a far more limited set of competitors for advertising dollars than exist today, as well as its universal service requirements. Ultimately, FCC reliance on competition and innovation is vital if the agency is to deliver optimal outcomes for the American public. The FCC should engage in a serious top-to-bottom review of its regulations and take steps to rescind any that are overly cumbersome or outdated. The Commission should focus its efforts on creating a market-friendly regulatory environment that fosters innovation and competition from a wide range of actors, including cable-based, broadband-based, and satellite- based Internet providers. AUTHOR’S NOTE: The preparation of this chapter was a collective enterprise of individuals involved in the 2025 Presidential Transition Project. All contributors to this chapter are listed at the front of this volume. While this chapter identifies certain issues on which the contributors did not all agree, the author alone assumes responsibility for the content of this chapter, and no views expressed herein should be attributed to any other individual.
Policy matches are calculated using semantic similarity between bill summaries and Project 2025 policy text. A score of 60% or higher indicates meaningful thematic overlap. This does not imply direct causation or intent, but highlights areas where legislation aligns with Project 2025 policy objectives.