Consumer and civil rights groups last week told the Trump administration that their proposed “reforms” of the FCC’s Lifeline program would undermine efforts to ensure equitable, affordable access to the internet for all Americans, and are based on lies about immigrant fraud.

Last January, the Trump FCC under Brendan Carr proposed a series of “reforms” to the agency’s Lifeline program, which, as part of the broader bipartisan Universal Service Fund (USF) program, provides qualifying low-income US households with a modest $9.25 monthly subsidy for telecom services (which jumps to $34.25 for tribal homes).

At the time, Carr insisted that the reforms were necessary to improve government efficiency.

“The FCC has an obligation to be a good steward of federal dollars,” Carr said in a prepared statement. “And that is why the agency will be taking a comprehensive look at the FCC’s nearly $1 billion dollar a year Lifeline program, which subsidizes phone and Internet services for low-income Americans.”

To further sell his pitch, Carr made the false claim that the program was somehow awash with illegal immigrants who were exploiting U.S. taxpayers. To “prove” his claim, Carr stated that more than $5 million in Lifeline money funded 116,000 dead people across three states, with the heaviest “fraud” occurring in California.

Image

“Over 80% of those scams took place in California alone,” Carr said. “That type of waste, fraud, and abuse is completely unacceptable. It should go without saying that only beneficiaries that are both living and here legally should qualify for benefits under this program,” Carr said.

In yet another bruising blow in the fight to ensure equitable access to high-speed Internet service, an appeals court struck down federal rules this week that aimed to combat digital redlining.

The ruling came despite a mandate from the bipartisan infrastructure law passed during the Biden administration that directed the FCC to develop “rules to facilitate equal access to broadband internet access service” that would prevent “digital discrimination of access based on income level, race, ethnicity, color, religion, or national origin.”

Not adopted until 2023 after a lengthy rulemaking process and public comment period, when the FCC published its final digital discrimination rules it gave the agency the authority to penalize Internet Service Providers (ISPs) whose policies resulted in “disparate impact,” even if the agency couldn’t prove deliberate discriminatory intent.

Among the real-world “disparate impact” examples advocates presented to the FCC were instances such as when residents of Hope Village, a mostly Black neighborhood in Detroit, experienced a 45-day Internet outage during the height of the pandemic lockdowns – as well as studies that found many large providers charge poor, minority neighborhoods significantly more money for slower broadband access than their more affluent, less diverse counterparts.

Lawmakers are pressuring the FCC to restore a council dedicated to ensuring that broadband availability is both equitable and affordable, especially for marginalized communities that have historically been overlooked and overcharged when it comes to Internet access.

A cornerstone of the Trump administration has been the wholesale (and at times illegal) termination of any and all digital equity initiatives aimed at making broadband more uniformly available and affordable for those long stuck on the wrong side of the digital divide.

That included last year’s dismantling of the federal Digital Equity Act, which mandated the creation of three different grant programs intended to shore up equitable, widespread access to affordable Internet, while providing the tools and digital literacy education needed to help neglected U.S. communities get online.

It also included the Trump FCC’s dismantling of the Communications Equity and Diversity Council (CEDC), which has operated in some capacity since 2003 under multiple partisan administrations to make the communications sector more equitable and reduce digital discrimination. Until FCC Chair Brendan Carr arbitrarily disbanded it in January 2025.

Image

Carr has historically been allied with the nation’s biggest telecom giants, consistently siding with regional monopolies on nearly all policy initiatives. But he’s also dutifully loyal to President Trump, who has targeted efforts to combat systemic racism.

Last year the Biden FCC implemented a new rule requiring that broadband providers include a “nutrition label for broadband,” making any fees, restrictions, usage caps, or other limits clear at the point of sale. The proposal was mandated by Congress as part of the bipartisan infrastructure law.

But four years after Congress proposed the idea, a new study indicates that many ISPs aren’t doing a great job adhering to the rules. The Trump FCC has also announced that it's taking formal steps to weaken or eliminate the rules as part of the agency’s broad, frontal assault on consumer protections.

The new academic study (first reported on by Broadband Breakfast) by York University researchers Jonathan A. Obar and Boxi Chen gave 35 different U.S. ISPs a ten-star based grade on how well they are adhering to the FCC broadband label requirements, including label placement, standardized formatting, machine-readable data files, and required policy links.

The results weren’t pretty: only sixteen ISPs properly placed labels at the point of sale as required, and not a single ISP received full marks for completely adhering to the FCC’s requirements. Only six ISPs received a full ten star ranking for proper formatting.

After decades of redlining and broadband “digital discrimination” by the nation’s biggest telecom monopolies, the FCC finally began taking aim at the problem in 2023. Now the entirety of those efforts are poised to be dismantled, courtesy of the Trump administration’s broad, controversial frontal assault on discrimination reforms and civil rights.

The 2021 infrastructure bill set aside $42.5 billion to expand broadband into all unserved parts of the United States.

But it also tasked the FCC with crafting new rules taking aim at “digital discrimination.” On November 15th of 2023 the agency obliged, passing rules banning ISPs from broadband discrimination based on income, race, or religion.

Civil rights and digital equity activists were split on the potential impact of the rules, but they did agree on one thing: it was historic for federal policymakers to finally admit that telecom monopoly deployments had unfairly excluded many low income and minority neighborhoods from affordable, next-generation broadband access.