United States

Washington has no digital ministry and no urban programme with smart-city money. The levers are spread across federal agencies, the 50 states, regional transit authorities and private utilities, and each state sets what its cities may do.

• Broadband subsidy: BEAD (Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment), the $42.45bn programme of the 2021 infrastructure law, flows from NTIA, the Commerce Department’s telecoms agency, to state broadband offices, which choose private providers. Since June 2025 it has been technology-neutral, so satellite competes with fibre; cost per location is the main test, and NTIA dropped the rules on government-owned networks.
• Municipal networks: 16 states restrict or bar them, and the FCC’s attempt to override two of those laws failed in court.
• Small cells: a 2018 FCC order, upheld in court in 2020, sets the fees a city is presumed allowed to charge, $270 per cell a year, and deadlines for its decisions. A city controls the pole but not the price.
• Public transport: the biggest networks, such as Boston’s MBTA, Philadelphia’s SEPTA and New York’s MTA, are state or regional authorities, with federal capital money. A mayor can pay for extra service, as Boston does for three fare-free bus routes, but does not run the network.
• Streets and vehicles: cities own their signals and kerbs, but states authorise speed cameras and license driverless cars. In 2023 it was California’s motor-vehicle department that suspended the permits of Cruise, General Motors’ robotaxi company, in San Francisco.
• Policing and cameras: no federal statute governs face recognition or plate readers. Cities may ban, approve or audit their own police technology, and states set the outer limits, as Virginia did in 2025 and Washington State in 2026.
• Energy: state utility commissions regulate the grid, and in 2023 a federal court held that the 1975 Energy Policy and Conservation Act blocked Berkeley’s ban on gas in new buildings. A city shapes its grid only if it owns the utility.
• Buildings: there is no national building or energy code; states adopt codes and zoning is local. Cities can cap emissions from existing buildings, as New York does, and 49 governments have joined a coalition to do the same.
• Data and online services: the 2019 open-data law binds federal agencies only. Login.gov, with more than 180 million accounts, signs people in for 54 federal agencies and states, and 21 states and Puerto Rico issue mobile IDs that airport security accepts. Cities build their own portals, and 18F, a federal digital-services team, was closed in March 2025.
• Procurement and AI: the 2016 federal source-code policy binds federal agencies only, and state law governs what cities buy. The pre-emption the December 2025 AI order seeks would expressly not reach states’ own purchase and use of AI.

The split decides what is easy. A US city is strong where the lever is a rule about its own conduct: what its police may buy, what its buildings may emit, what scooter firms must report. Such rules need no federal money and travel by copying. Where the lever is infrastructure or a grant, the state, a utility or Washington decides.

The National League of Cities lobbies for municipal leaders, and the US Conference of Mayors, founded in 1933, is open to more than 1,500 mid-sized and large cities. Climate Mayors, a network chaired by Phoenix’s Kate Gallego, opposes the federal climate rollback. Two bodies the cities govern carry their standards: the Open Mobility Foundation for street data and the GovAI Coalition, founded by San José, for buying AI.

Philanthropy fills part of the gap: Bloomberg Philanthropies’ What Works Cities had certified 104 cities across the Americas for their use of data by February 2025. Code for America, the best-known civic-tech non-profit, stopped sponsoring its volunteer Brigades in 2023, and some carried on as independent groups. The American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital-rights group, press cities on surveillance.

Donald Trump began his second term as President in January 2025. Republicans hold both chambers of Congress: 53 of 100 senators and 218 of 435 House seats, against 214 Democrats, one independent and two vacancies. After three funding lapses since October 2025, the government runs on a stopgap law, and November brings the mid-term elections for Congress and most governors.

There has been no national smart-city programme since 2021. USDOT, the transport department, ran the only one, the Smart City Challenge, in which 78 cities competed in 2016. Columbus won $40m from the department and $10m from a foundation. Its successor line, the SMART grants, had awarded nearly $280m by December 2024; the 2026 transport budget cut it by over $200m.

Broadband shows the gap between money announced and money paid. BEAD was announced in 2021 and rewritten in June 2025, and by 25 August 2026 all 56 state and territory plans were approved. NTIA told the GAO that it had awarded about $18.4bn, which it expects to bring service to about 3.8 million locations. By February 2026 Louisiana had released $43m, a tenth of the $430m in contracts it had signed by then. How much has been paid out nationally has not been published.

From our library

Broadband Deployment: Agencies Should Take Steps to Better Target Underserved Areas and Consider Sustainability (GAO-26-107725, 31 August 2026)

The audit office’s count of what the national broadband programme has awarded.

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In September NTIA let states spend part of the roughly $21bn saved by the rewrite on further building rounds. It did not say how much, and its rules for the rest have not been issued.

Other lines were cancelled. The $2.75bn of Digital Equity Act grants for digital inclusion were terminated in May 2025, after the President called the programme “RACIST and ILLEGAL”; Philadelphia lost an $11.9m grant it had been approved for. In July 2026 a judge struck down only its category for racial or ethnic minorities, and NTIA agreed to run the competitive grants again without it. The larger grants to states for digital-skills plans were not part of the case and remain cancelled.

The budget law of 4 July 2025, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, took back about $2.4bn that had been awarded but not yet legally obligated from a programme to repair neighbourhoods cut through by highways. EPA terminated its $20bn green-finance fund and its $7bn Solar for All programme.

In August 2026 the full appeals court in Washington kept an order blocking the first termination in place, and the government plans to appeal to the Supreme Court. On 18 September a judge vacated the solar termination, and EPA is considering an appeal. In October 2025 the energy department cancelled 321 awards worth about $7.56bn.

American cities sit outside the EU’s programmes. The US is not associated with Horizon Europe, so no US city could join the EU mission for climate-neutral and smart cities.

Sovereignty here means states against Washington. An executive order of December 2025 set up a task force whose “sole responsibility” is to challenge state AI laws, and tied leftover broadband money to them. The Justice Department joined a company’s lawsuit, moving to invalidate Colorado’s AI Act, and in May 2026 Colorado’s legislature voted to repeal and replace it.

From our library

Executive Order 14365: Ensuring a National Policy Framework for Artificial Intelligence (11 December 2025)

Federal AI policy preempts state laws, links broadband funding, and preserves local procurement autonomy.

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Plate readers that local police share are where the fight is loudest. Flock Safety sells the plate-reading cameras many of them use. 404 Media, a news site, found more than 4,000 searches of that shared data run by local and state police for federal agencies or with a possible immigration motive. Fortune counted at least 30 cities ending Flock contracts since early 2025, against more than 5,000 using the cameras. Garrett Langley, Flock’s chief executive, said police need the tools and “should also hold them accountable to not break the law.”

Smart Columbus, the competition’s winner, cost about $55m over five years. Its clearest result was rides to prenatal care: in a study of 143 pregnant women, 18% of those offered the new ride service took no trips, against 44% of those left with the usual ride line. The researchers said a ride service alone was unlikely to improve birth outcomes much.

From our library

Smart Columbus — USDOT Smart City Challenge Final Report, Executive Summary (June 2021)

The national competition’s winner reports what its pilots delivered and dropped.

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A downtown self-driving shuttle carried 16,062 passengers in 2018–19; its successor stopped carrying passengers two weeks after its 2020 launch, when a sudden stop injured a passenger, and delivered food boxes instead. Truck platooning was dropped, and no other city is reported to have adopted the pilots.

Los Angeles went the other way. Its transport department wrote the Mobility Data Specification, an open format in which scooter and bike operators must report trips to the city. The city handed the standard to the Open Mobility Foundation, which says more than 1,200 cities now use it.

Seattle’s surveillance ordinance requires council approval and an impact report for each surveillance technology the city uses. Its 2019 review counted 710 requests for privacy reviews, but the council had approved reports on only two systems already in use, both traffic tools, and none for the police. By May 2021, 21 cities and counties had passed similar laws. In March 2026 Seattle’s police switched off all their plate readers to comply with a new state law.

From our library

2019 Annual Surveillance Usage Review (Seattle Office of Inspector General and City Auditor memo, 30 September 2020)

Seattle’s first audit of its own surveillance ordinance.

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San Diego shows the order reversed. In 2016 it put sensors with cameras on about 3,200 streetlights in a $30m programme, and police used the footage in hundreds of cases before the public knew. The city switched them off in 2020, and in 2022 passed an ordinance giving the council a vote on every surveillance technology. Under it, the council approved 500 new cameras with plate readers in 2023, and in December 2025 the police’s continued use of 54 surveillance technologies.

Chattanooga’s smart grid exists because the city owns its electric utility, EPB, which used a $111m federal grant in 2009 for automated switching. A university study published by EPB credits the grid with about 59% fewer outage minutes a year. Tennessee law keeps EPB’s fibre inside its electric territory, so it cannot serve its neighbours.

Fort Collins had to vote for its fibre, because a 2005 Colorado law required a local vote first. In 2017, 57% said yes, against a campaign that spent $900,999 and that ILSR, a community-broadband institute, describes as a front for Comcast and CenturyLink. After more than 120 Colorado communities had voted the same way, the state repealed the law in 2023. The city’s network, Connexion, had 24,772 customers in late 2025, 46% of the homes it passes.

Detroit’s Project Green Light, which links businesses’ cameras live to the police, had 907 partners in 2024. The Justice Department’s evaluation register rates it ineffective for violent and disorder crime. Mountain View, in California, switched off all 30 of its Flock cameras in February 2026 after more than 250 agencies had searched its data without permission. Its police chief, Mike Canfield, said: “I personally no longer have confidence in this particular vendor.”

From our library

Project Green Light Detroit — CrimeSolutions programme profile (US Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs)

Case study reveals Detroit camera network rated ineffective for violent crime in two quasi‑experimental studies.

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Seattle’s residents are the most wary of face recognition among the ten US cities in the IMD Smart City Index, a survey of how residents experience their city. Only 50.4% are comfortable with it to lower crime, against 71.2% in Philadelphia. One survey cannot show whether city rules shaped those views.

City-written rules carried a long way without federal money. A scooter-data format from Los Angeles spread through a foundation the cities govern, Seattle’s camera ordinance became a model, and in Colorado, after more than 120 towns had voted to opt out, the legislature repealed the state law that had held them back. Elsewhere they stopped at the state line. Seattle’s plate readers went dark under a state law rather than the city’s own ordinance, Chattanooga’s fibre cannot cross the boundary Tennessee drew round its utility, and no city rule replaces the skills and street grants Washington took back.