Los Angeles — The Biden administration is moving to ease the elimination of an expiring broadband subsidy program that has helped provide internet access to more than 23 million households, using funds from an existing program that helps libraries and schools provide WiFi hotspots to students and patrons.
Federal Communications Commission Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel told The Associated Press last week that the commission voted in July to “modernize” a federal program called E-Rate to fill at least some of the holes left by the Affordable Connectivity Program, which gives low-income households monthly subsidies for high-speed internet.
“A lot of these homes are at risk of losing their power,” Rosenworcel said during a visit to an elementary school in Los Angeles. “We need to be clear that electricity isn’t always an on-off switch. It’s about sustainability.”
The Affordable Connectivity Program, part of a broader government effort to provide affordable internet to every home and business in the country, was not renewed by Congress and ran out of funding earlier this year.
Mothers of students at Union Avenue Elementary, where the student body is 93% Latino, told Rosenworcel that the need for internet has never been greater, and the costs of rent and food make it hard to prioritize staying connected, they said.
An emotional Rosenworcel called the mothers’ stories “horrifying” after hearing them describe using Wi-Fi in McDonald’s parking lots to see remote doctor’s appointments, pay bills and provide their children with internet access for online homework.
“Without that connection at home, those families and their children will have a much harder time surviving in the modern world,” she said.
Established in the 1990s, the E-Rate program has provided eligible schools and libraries with more than $7 billion in discounts to purchase broadband products and services since 2022. The program has benefited more than 12,500 libraries, nearly half of which are in rural areas, and 106,000 schools, according to an Associated Press data analysis.
The latest funding round expanded the E-Rate program to include WiFi on school buses, and Rosenworcel said that starting next year, the list of eligible products will be expanded to include WiFi hotspots.
The Affordable Connectivity Program helped one in six U.S. households get internet access. Rosenworcel said the decision to include WiFi hotspots in the E-Rate was also a response to the failure to extend the subsidies.
“For children to really thrive, they need access to the internet at home,” Rosenworcel said.
Alex Hauff, who manages digital equity programs at the Baltimore County Library in Maryland, said the library started a WiFi hotspot lending program with about 50 devices just before the coronavirus lockdown began in 2020. The program has since expanded to include 1,000 devices, he said, but it still can’t meet demand: More than 160 people are waiting to use a hotspot, Hauff said.
“In most cases, we’ve heard from our branches that communities are renting these hotspots because that’s their only source of connectivity,” Hoff said.
Hoff said the biggest barrier to connection is the high cost, and that the library system plans to apply for E-Rate funding to double the number of hotspots it provides to patrons.
The program’s expansion hasn’t pleased everyone: Two Republicans on the committee argued that the E-Rate is meant to strengthen and support internet access in the classroom, not at home or other places where students “might want to learn.”
“Last I checked, a school with classrooms and libraries is a physical place with an address, not a philosophical or conceptual idea about instruction or education,” Republican committee member Nathan Symington said in a statement after the vote.
Rosenworcel, who became FCC chair after President Joe Biden defeated President Donald Trump in the 2020 election, said Republicans’ rules on the program’s scope were too restrictive.
After the FCC voted to expand WiFi hotspots to school buses, a group of Republican senators backed a lawsuit challenging the agency’s decision. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who led the group, said in a news release that the commission’s new rules are an overreach that “harms children by allowing them unsupervised access to the internet.”
Partisan divides aren’t the only threat to the E-Rate: The same Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals where Sen. Cruz filed an amicus brief on school bus WiFi ruled in late July that the funding mechanism that supports the E-Rate and other FCC-administered internet access programs (known as the Universal Service Fund) is illegal.
“The future of the Universal Service Fund is now in a state of great uncertainty because of the Fifth Circuit’s decision,” said John Windhausen, executive director of the School, Health & Library Broadband Coalition. “This is a terrible decision, completely inconsistent with past Supreme Court precedent and completely inconsistent with other appeals courts that have ruled exactly the opposite.”
Further litigation is expected, and the case may end up before the Supreme Court, Windhausen said.
Chairman Rosenworcel is confident in the integrity of the universal service fund and called the Fifth Circuit’s decision “misguided and wrong.”
“It’s been a great benefit to the United States to ensure that everyone, no matter where they live, has access to modern communications,” Rosenworcel said.
Rosenworcel said the FCC could mobilize quickly if Congress simply updated the Affordable Connectivity program, which he said may be the easiest way to address the need.
