NTIA Just Restarted the $1.25 Billion Digital Equity Competition It Killed in 2025. The Paperwork Notice Landed August 25; the NOFO Targets December.

The Digital Equity Competitive Grant Program is coming back, and the signal that it is actually coming back is the most boring document the federal government produces.

On August 25, 2026, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration published a Paperwork Reduction Act notice opening a 60-day public comment period on the information collection and application requirements it intends to use for a new round of Digital Equity funding. Comments close October 26, 2026.

Nobody reads PRA notices. They should read this one. An agency does not clear an information collection through OMB unless it intends to actually collect the information — and the burden estimate inside the notice is the closest thing to a public forecast of the competition's shape that exists right now.

NTIA estimates approximately 800 applicants, each spending roughly 18 hours on an application, for 14,400 annual burden hours and $696,240 in public cost.

Hold onto that 18-hour figure. It is the single most useful number in the document, and we will come back to what it implies.

How the program died and how it came back

The Digital Equity Act, enacted as part of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, authorized $1.25 billion for the Competitive Grant Program — $250 million a year for five years — to fund digital inclusion work: device access, digital skills training, technical support, affordability navigation, and telehealth access for populations that broadband deployment alone does not reach.

The first competition drew more than 700 applications seeking $6.5 billion. Awards began going out in January 2025.

On May 9, 2025, following a presidential announcement, Commerce terminated the program and every grant made under it. NTIA's own data puts the cancellation at 120 awards worth approximately $1.4 billion. Organizations that had signed award documents, hired staff, and started programs found the money gone.

The National Digital Inclusion Alliance, whose own $25.7 million award was among those terminated, sued in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

On July 15, 2026, Judge John D. Bates issued the ruling that made the revival possible. He held that the statute's racial classification provision — the inclusion of racial and ethnic minority status among the "covered populations" that grantees must serve — was unconstitutional, but that it was severable from the rest of the Act.

Severability is the whole case. If the provision had been inseverable, the unconstitutionality of one clause would have taken the entire Competitive Grant Program down with it. Because it is severable, the remaining statute stands: the authorization, the covered populations other than the racial classification, the eligibility structure, and the $1.25 billion all survive.

On August 3, 2026, Commerce and NDIA filed a joint status report in which the department stated it "presently targets a December 2026 opening date for the Competitive Grant Program application," and that NTIA is "currently preparing a new Notice of Funding Opportunity." Commerce was careful to frame December as a target, not a commitment, citing "various layers of Executive Branch review" and Paperwork Reduction Act requirements.

The August 25 notice is NTIA clearing the second of those two obstacles.

What the new competition will and will not look like

Same statute, minus one clause. NTIA has committed to issuing a NOFO that excludes the racial classification the court struck while otherwise incorporating the Act's existing statutory requirements.

The covered populations that remain are the operative eligibility frame: low-income households, aging individuals, incarcerated individuals (excluding those in federal correctional facilities), veterans, individuals with disabilities, individuals with a language barrier including English learners and those with low literacy, and rural residents. Every one of those categories survived the ruling intact.

That matters more than it sounds. Organizations whose Digital Equity programming was framed primarily around race-based population targeting need to rebuild the eligibility narrative from the ground up. Organizations that framed it around income, age, disability, incarceration, language, or geography — which is most digital inclusion work in practice — need to change comparatively little.

Eligible entity types remain broad: nonprofits, community anchor institutions, educational agencies, workforce development entities, Tribal entities, state and local governmental entities, libraries, community colleges, and partnerships among them.

The unresolved question is how many years of money come out at once. Reporting on the August filings indicates the intent is to combine all remaining Competitive Grant Program funding — the FY2024, FY2025, and FY2026 tranches — into a single NOFO released in a single round. Whether that lands as the full $1.25 billion authorization or the smaller amount actually appropriated is the number to watch when the NOFO text posts. Appropriations through FY2024 reached $750 million across the Act's programs, and the Competitive Grant Program's share of the remaining balance is not yet public.

Read the burden estimate as a design signal

Back to the 18 hours.

Eighteen hours is not a federal research proposal. It is not a BEAD application. It is a short-form competition — narrative, budget, populations served, a few attachments. Compare that to the effort a $2 million federal grant application typically consumes and the implication is clear: NTIA is designing for volume and speed, not for an exhaustive review of a small number of large proposals.

The 800 applicant estimate points the same way. It is slightly above the 700-plus that applied the first time, which suggests NTIA is anticipating both returning applicants and new entrants, and is not planning eligibility restrictions that would thin the field.

Now do the arithmetic that matters. If the pool is roughly $1 billion and 800 applicants apply, the average award is a bit over $1 million and the funding rate depends entirely on how much each applicant asks for. Last cycle, 700-plus applicants requested $6.5 billion against a program authorized at $1.25 billion — a roughly 5-to-1 oversubscription. Assume the same ratio holds.

That is the planning number: expect to be one of eight hundred, competing for something like one dollar in five you request.

What to do between now and December

1. File a comment by October 26 — on the mechanics, not the politics. PRA comments are the wrong venue for arguing about the program's merits and the right venue for arguing about the instrument. If the application requires a data element your organization cannot produce (baseline broadband adoption rates in your service area, device inventory counts, longitudinal outcome tracking), say so, say what it costs you to produce it, and propose an alternative. NTIA has to respond to burden objections in a way it does not have to respond to policy objections. This is also the only opportunity to shape the form before it is locked.

2. Rebuild your covered-population documentation now. The eligibility case you make in December will rest on the seven surviving covered populations. Pull the data this fall: county-level poverty and age distribution from ACS, disability prevalence, limited-English-proficiency counts from your school district, veteran population from VA county-level data, rural designation. Have the citations in a document before the NOFO drops. Applicants who spent the 2024 cycle building this evidence base have a real advantage and should not assume it transfers unchanged — the framing has to shift off any race-based targeting language.

3. If you were one of the 120, decide what you are recreating. Organizations whose 2025 awards were terminated are in an unusual position: you have a scored, funded, federally reviewed project design sitting in a drawer. That is enormously valuable and it is also a trap. The reviewers changed, the statutory frame changed, and the competitive field changed. Recycle the evidence base and the partnership structure; rewrite the narrative against the new NOFO. Do not resubmit the 2024 application with the dates changed.

4. Do not build a budget that assumes the award. The lesson of May 9, 2025 is that a signed federal award document was not sufficient protection against program-level termination. Whatever you propose, structure it so that a mid-stream cancellation does not take down your organization: avoid staffing plans that require the grant to sustain core positions, avoid facility commitments that outlast the period of performance, and understand that the OMB rewrite of 2 CFR Part 200 — which proposes broader termination-for-convenience authority and is currently blocked from finalization only until December 11 — may govern awards made under this NOFO.

5. Treat December as a target, not a date. Commerce said so explicitly. The PRA comment period alone runs to October 26, after which NTIA must review comments and OMB must approve the collection. A December opening requires that sequence to run without friction. Build your internal timeline for a December-to-February window and be ready early rather than betting on a specific week.

The larger read

The Digital Equity revival is, so far, the clearest example in 2026 of a canceled federal program actually coming back — not through appropriations, not through a policy reversal, but because a court found the constitutional defect severable and left the rest of the statute standing.

That is worth noting for anyone whose program was terminated in the past eighteen months. The mechanism that resurrected this one was litigation over statutory structure, brought by a directly injured grantee, resolved on a narrow legal question rather than a broad one. It took fourteen months from termination to a court ruling, and it will take at least five more to reach an open application window.

Nineteen months from cancellation to a competition, in the best-case version. That is the actual clock on getting terminated federal money back, and it is the number to plan around.