The two-year-old Affordable Connectivity Program, created as a part of the Democratic Party-led Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, looks like it will be coming to an end because of lack of funds. The program, which offers eligible households $30 per month toward their internet bills as well as small subsidies for laptops or tablets, has been in jeopardy since Republicans gained control in the House.
The Federal Communications Commission made the announcement on Monday, saying that it was starting to wind down the program earlier than previously expected because Congress is not providing necessary funds. This follows FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel’s repeated appeals and an additional request for $6 billion to keep the program running. According to the FCC, the program will run out of money by May.
In tandem with the FCC announcement, Rosenworcel sent a letter to members of Congress asking to fund the program that “now helps nearly 23 million households nationwide—in rural America, urban America, and everything in between—get online and stay online so that they have the high-speed internet service they need to fully participate in modern life.”
If Congress does not provide additional funding for the ACP in the near future, millions of households will lose the ACP benefit that they use to afford internet service. This also means that roughly 1,700 internet service providers will be affected by the termination of the ACP and may cut off service to households no longer supported by the program. Moreover, as the Administrator of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration previously informed Congress, losing the ACP would undermine the historic $42.5 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment Program, for which the ACP supports a stable customer base to help incentivize deployment in rural areas.
Unfortunately for millions of Americans, the Republican Party, which struggles to do the bare minimum to keep the country running, has long been attacking the program, with prominent Republicans calling it a part of a “reckless spending spree.” Sens. John Thune and Ted Cruz, joined by Reps. Cathy McMorris Rodgers and Bob Latta, recently claimed that a large number of the households benefiting from the ACP were “households that already had broadband prior to the subsidy.”
Unsurprisingly, those Republicans forgot to mention that many of those households had signed up for internet access under the Emergency Broadband Benefit Program, which the ACP superseded.
Also not surprising is the fact that the same Republicans attacking the infrastructure program that helps tens of millions of Americans make no mention of the trillions of dollars that continue to be lost due to their Trump-era tax breaks for the rich.
When Democratic lawmakers launched the ACP in 2021, they created the largest internet affordability program in U.S. history. While almost the entire Republican Party voted against the infrastructure bill, the majority of Americans are happy when the government works for its citizens—whether they realize who is doing that work or not. Meanwhile, the previous Republican administration halted the expansion of broadband subsidies to low-income families.
There are fundamentally important differences between the two major political parties in our country and that fact bears repeating.
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