How many participants were selected for the Cybersecurity Pilot Program?

707: 645 schools and school districts, 50 libraries, and 12 consortia of schools and libraries, spanning all 50 states, Puerto Rico, the District of Columbia, and several tribal lands. The FCC announced the full list in a Public Notice on January 16, 2025, chosen from a pool of more than 2,700 applicants that had requested a combined $3.7 billion.

What can the Cybersecurity Pilot Program funding actually pay for?

Four categories: advanced/next-generation firewalls, endpoint protection, identity protection and authentication, and monitoring, detection, and response (MDR) services. Basic firewalls are excluded because they're already eligible under regular E-Rate Category 2. USAC maintains the full list as the Pilot Eligible Services List on fcc.gov.

Do participants pay anything out of pocket, or is it fully funded?

Participants pay a non-discount share based on their existing E-Rate Category 1 discount rate, the same 20-90% sliding scale tied to free/reduced-price lunch eligibility that applies to regular E-Rate funding. A district with a 90% discount rate contributes 10% of eligible Pilot costs; a district with a 40% discount rate contributes 60%.

Where can I see how much of the $200 million has actually been committed?

There's no single running total published anywhere. USAC discloses each wave of Funding Commitment Decision Letters separately, through FCC/USAC announcements and press coverage, and posts the underlying applicant-level data as open datasets on its Socrata platform (opendata.usac.org and datahub.usac.org). Reconstructing a current total means adding up every wave announcement by hand.

Is the Cybersecurity Pilot Program going to become permanent?

That's the question the pilot exists to answer. It's explicitly a test, modeled on the FCC's earlier Connected Care Pilot, to gather data on whether Universal Service Fund support for cybersecurity should become a permanent, non-pilot program. The FCC hasn't published a timeline for that decision, and no GAO or FCC Office of Inspector General audit specific to the pilot has been published as of this writing.

The Cybersecurity Pilot Is Spending $200M: What's Public and What Isn't

The FCC's Cybersecurity Pilot Program is a three-year experiment with a nine-figure budget, and it runs almost entirely on disclosures that arrive one press release at a time. That's not a criticism so much as a description: unlike the FRN Status Tool that tracks every regular E-Rate funding request in something close to real time, the Pilot has no equivalent single dashboard. What's actually public is more granular than most people realize. What's missing is a running total.

What the Pilot Actually Is

The Schools and Libraries Cybersecurity Pilot Program is a $200 million, three-year test of whether Universal Service Fund dollars should support cybersecurity the way they already support connectivity. It's modeled on the FCC's earlier Connected Care Pilot: a bounded experiment designed to generate data the Commission can use to decide whether to make cybersecurity funding a permanent, ongoing E-Rate category rather than a one-off.

Eligible spending falls into four buckets: advanced and next-generation firewalls (basic firewalls are already E-Rate Category 2 eligible, so they're excluded here), endpoint protection, identity protection and authentication, and monitoring, detection, and response services. USAC publishes the specifics as the Pilot Eligible Services List. Participants pay a non-discount share tied to their existing E-Rate Category 1 discount rate, the same 20-90% formula used everywhere else in the program, so the cost-share math will look familiar to anyone who already files a Form 471.

Who's In It, and How Public That Is

This part is fully public and has been since the beginning. The FCC released a 32-page Public Notice on January 16, 2025, naming all 707 selected participants: 645 schools and districts, 50 libraries, and 12 consortia, drawn from every state, Puerto Rico, DC, and several tribal lands. They were chosen from a pool of more than 2,700 applicants who had collectively requested $3.7 billion, nearly nineteen times the pilot's budget, with the FCC giving weight to low-income and tribal applicants in making the cut.

Because the pilot doesn't run on E-Rate's annual funding-year cycle, there was a single application window for the Pilot FCC Form 471: March 18 through September 15, 2025. Every one of the 707 selected participants who wanted funding had to file inside that window.

What USAC Publishes, and How Detailed It Gets

Before any funding commitments went out, USAC did something the main E-Rate program doesn't really have an equivalent of: it released a complete funding-request dataset. In December 2025, that release covered close to 90% of selected participants and $157.6 million in requested funding across all 50 states, and it's public enough to draw real analysis from. Texas and California alone accounted for 36% of every dollar requested. Monitoring, detection, and response services made up more than 40% of requested dollars, more than the other three eligible categories combined, a sign that districts are buying ongoing operational security capacity rather than one-time perimeter hardware.

That same underlying data lives on USAC's open data platform going forward. The Cybersecurity Pilot FCC Form 470 Tool Data and FRN Status Tool datasets on opendata.usac.org and datahub.usac.org carry participant details, Billed Entity Numbers, requested services and costs, application statuses, and funding commitments and disbursements as they're issued, in the same Socrata format the regular E-Rate program uses for its FRN and Form 470 data.

Where the Money's Actually Gone, One Wave at a Time

Here's where the gap between "public" and "easy to find" opens up. Funding Commitment Decision Letters go out in waves, and each wave gets its own announcement rather than an update to a cumulative counter:

Wave	Date	Amount	Applicants funded	Notes
1	Dec 17, 2025	$18.8M	140	30 states; Illinois led with $2.07M/26 applicants, Texas second at $1.62M/16 applicants
2	Jan 28, 2026	~$10M	51	Average award rose to $190,948, up from $130,882 in Wave 1
Waves 1-2 combined	through Jan 2026	$28.1M	191	14% of the $200M budget
Waves 1-6 combined	through mid-June 2026	~$102M	not separately reported per wave	roughly 51% of the $200M budget

That last row is the most recent cumulative figure confirmed in reporting as of this writing. There isn't a public page that updates that number as new waves land; it has to be pieced together from each wave's own coverage, which means a provider or applicant trying to track the pilot's pace in real time is working from whatever the last press mention said, not a live count.

The Actual Gaps

A few things aren't public, or aren't public yet, and they're worth naming plainly rather than guessing at:

No single running total. The FRN Status Tool gives anyone a live, queryable view of committed E-Rate funding. The Pilot has the underlying open data, but no equivalent rollup page that says "$X of $200M committed as of today."

The gap between selected and funded isn't fully explained. Close to 90% of the 707 selected participants had filed funding requests by the December 2025 dataset release, which leaves roughly 10% unaccounted for. Whether that's participants still working through the process, ones who dropped out, or something else hasn't been broken out publicly.

No independent audit yet. No GAO or FCC Office of Inspector General report specific to the Cybersecurity Pilot Program has been published. The FCC OIG's broader fraud-risk dashboard work spans other USF programs, but the pilot itself, three-year and still in its first two years of disbursement, hasn't had a dedicated review.

No published timeline for the permanence decision. The whole point of the pilot is to inform whether cybersecurity funding becomes a standing part of E-Rate. The FCC hasn't said when it expects to make that call, or what data threshold it's waiting on.

Why This Is Worth Tracking as a Provider

If you sell any of the four eligible categories, especially MDR services given how much of the requested demand sits there, the open data is the actual tool here, not the press releases. The wave announcements tell you the pace of disbursement; the underlying Form 470/471 datasets tell you which districts and libraries are in the pipeline and what they've asked for. That's the same read-the-data-not-the-headline approach that works for regular E-Rate Category 2 buying, applied to a program that's smaller, newer, and less picked-over by the rest of the market.

FRNHQ tracks committed E-Rate funding, contract expirations, and re-bid windows across every state, the same discipline worth applying to the Pilot's own open datasets as more waves land. See where your E-Rate pipeline stands inside FRNHQ, or start with E-Rate activity in Illinois and Texas, the two states leading Pilot demand so far, alongside the broader E-Rate hub and our Category 2 budgets guide for how Pilot funding fits next to the C2 dollars districts already have.