Making a Case For a Broadband Program That Helps

The school choice revolution sweeping America is proof that voucher programs work. Congress should take note of this when they consider whether or not to continue funding a popular voucher program that brings the internet to millions of low income Americans.

West Virginia enacted the first universal school choice program in 2021. Since then, 12 states have followed suit, and another 17 enjoy partial school choice programs. The success of this movement lies in the power of voucher programs to cut through bureaucracy and allow market-driven approaches to welfare and social services.

Vouchers work for education, and they work for the internet, too.

The Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) currently provides more than 23 million households representing nearly 60 million Americans a voucher of $30 per month to spend on internet service, costing a total of $14 billion in the last two years. To qualify, households must be at or below 200 percent of the poverty line or be eligible for myriad other programs like SNAP, Medicaid, SSI, Pell Grants, or free or reduced school lunch. ISPs have offered affordable tiers of service to capture this low-income market. By all measures, the program is popular with consumers and industry, but with funds running low at the end of April, new enrollments were halted and the voucher was slashed to $14 per month. At the end of May, ACP will be out of money entirely if Congress does not act. If this happens, we will have passed on a generational opportunity to reform and eliminate broadband subsidy programs.

According to the Government Accountability Office, there are currently over 130 broadband programs spread across 15 different agencies. No one is entirely sure how many programs or how much money actually goes to addressing broadband connectivity, and writing legislation on the subject requires multiple provisions to prevent duplicative spending (as I know from the personal experience in my previous life as a Senate staffer). Many, such as the notorious Rural Utility Service program run through the Department of Agriculture or the FCC’s RDOF program, are rife with wasteful spending that accomplishes little. A group of RDOF applicants, for example, are currently petitioning the FCC for permission to cancel their commitments and reapply for the $42.5 billion BEAD program instead. The Universal Service Fund-supported Lifeline, High Cost, E-Rate, and Rural Healthcare programs cost $9 billion between them - all taken from landline phone users in their monthly bills.

In each case, vast sums are wasted on administrative overhead. ACP vouchers, by contrast, empower consumers and market forces to deliver service much more inexpensively to each household. They are not given to companies with dozens of strings attached that render implementation infeasible. Rather than let the program die, Congress should fund it and eliminate all the others (once current appropriations and contracts run their course).

Some conservatives see ACP funding running out as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to claim a scalp from the welfare state and raise legitimate concerns about its wastefulness since 80 percent of recipients could afford internet service without the program. That’s a fair point, but this approach fails to address two problems — a political one and an economic one. The political problem is the 60 million Americans captured by the program, who are just as common in red rural districts as they are in blue urban ones according to data collected by the Digital Progress Institute. Even filtering out the 80 percent who can pay their own way, if the program is slashed, 12 million people will suddenly be without internet service. These people will demand the government provide service somehow, and that leads to the economic problem: Alternatives to the voucher program are far more inefficient.

Instead of letting the program die, conservatives should consider using ACP as leverage to extract reforms and eliminate most of the other duplicative broadband programs. Democrats want to keep the program; make them pay for it with reforms. Lowering the eligibility threshold from 200 percent of the poverty line to 100 percent and eliminating the co-eligibility with other programs will filter out most of the 80 percent who could otherwise afford broadband, making the program far cheaper to sustain. Requiring Social Security Numbers to enroll, which is not currently a requirement, can eliminate most fraud. Once BEAD has connected all Americans, ACP can be held up as the program to replace redundant broadband subsidies, leading to a massive reduction in government spending and bureaucracy. At the end of it all, ACP will prove the least-disruptive program to provide internet to all Americans, which will help accelerate economic growth and fend off calls for costlier welfare programs.

School choice may prove Milton Friedman’s greatest legacy. The negative income tax, which would provide a safety net with no social service bureaucracy, has yet to have its day. With ACP, Congress has an opportunity to bring us a step closer to that reality. Unfortunately, they’re currently blowing it.