An estimated 33 million U.S. households are eligible for assistance under a program known as Lifeline, but poor service and years of government mismanagement and neglect mean few use it.
The coronavirus has reinforced the Internet as the fabric of modern American life, a luxury-turned-necessity for a generation now forced to work, learn and communicate primarily through the Web. But it also has laid bare the country’s inequalities — and the role Washington has played in exacerbating these long-known divides.
Nowhere is the gap more startling than with Lifeline, a roughly $2.4 billion digital safety net conceived nearly three decades ago to ensure that all Americans could access reliable communications. Families who rely on Lifeline say they have struggled to talk to their doctors, employers and loved ones throughout the pandemic, illustrating how significant technical shortcomings, and years of government neglect, have undermined a critical aid program at a time when it is needed most.
Many Lifeline subscribers are stuck with service so subpar that it would be unrecognizable to most app-loving, data-hungry smartphone users, according to interviews with more than two dozen participants and policy experts, including members of Congress, Biden administration officials, state regulators, telecom executives and public-interest advocates. The program’s inadequacies are so great that even those who are eligible for help often turn it down: More than 33 million households are eligible to receive Lifeline support, yet only 1 in 4 of these Americans actually takes advantage of it, according to U.S. government estimates prepared in October.
Yet attempts to update Lifeline and remedy its well-known shortcomings have stalled in Washington for years. The recently departed Trump administration even gutted plans to adapt the telecom benefit program so that it would have been more useful in helping people obtain broadband more easily at home, a change that might have been helpful now that state and federal health officials are pleading with people to stay indoors.
Low-income families still stand to gain a major reprieve once the U.S. government begins disbursing billions of dollars in new broadband rebates under a coronavirus stimulus program adopted by Congress in December. But the effort is expected to last only until the money runs out in a few months. Its looming expiration has touched off a fierce new lobbying battle in Washington — and threatens to subject millions of cash-strapped Americans to the same struggles they had faced before.
“People are ordering their groceries, they’re learning, they’re talking to the doctor, they’re scheduling vaccine appointments — everything is being done on the Internet,” said Rep. Mike Doyle (D-Pa.), who leads a key telecom-focused committee in the House. “To say that a certain percentage of our population is not able to do these things in this day and age is not morally right, it’s not fair, and it is has to be dealt with.”
“This program we have isn’t working,” he said.
The country’s digital divide — the gap between the haves and have-nots in accessing and affording the Internet — vexed policymakers long before the pandemic. At least 18 million Americans still lack speedy, reliable connectivity, the Federal Communications Commission found in a report released last June, though agency officials have cautioned that the actual number is probably much higher. The disconnect disproportionately affects low-income Americans and people of color, further depriving them of access to the tools they need to obtain financial help, find jobs and otherwise participate in digital life.
To help more Americans get connected, Congress, the FCC and other government agencies spend billions each year on programs that make broadband more available and affordable. The linchpin of that effort is Lifeline, part of the roughly $9 billion spent annually on initiatives that aim to boost rural broadband, fund classroom technology and aid low-income families. The Reagan-era Lifeline program imposes fees on telecom giants such as AT&T and Verizon, which pass them along to phone subscribers on their monthly bills. The money then funds a system that subsidizes low-income Americans’ landline or smartphone services, with the sums paid directly from the government to a Lifeline user’s telecom provider. Some Lifeline subscribers alternatively can use it to subsidize home Internet connections.
Typically, Lifeline subscribers receive free service, sparing those deep in poverty from having to take on steep costs just to access tools that are critical for their financial and physical well-being. But the program in practice has proved highly restrictive. The government often provides a monthly $9.25 credit to companies that offer both voice and data mobile service, an amount that hasn’t increased in almost 10 years. While most Americans over that period have seen faster speeds and fewer caps on their ability to talk and text — plus higher bills — Lifeline plans generally have stayed the same.
The limits of Lifeline mean that low-income Americans using the program often are capped at 1,000 minutes a month, receive about 4 gigabytes of data, and may contend with download speeds that can feel like the functional equivalent of 3G, more than a decade behind everyone else. Subscribers can pay more for additional service, but some cannot afford the extra costs of better connectivity and the benefits it provides, such as the ability to stream video conversations through Zoom and other tools.
The restrictions have been especially problematic during the pandemic, as Americans find themselves more dependent than ever on their mobile devices to stay connected. Many Lifeline subscribers say they have had to make unfair trade-offs — talking either to family or to doctors, for example, or participating in their communities or saving precious minutes for emergencies — that most Americans would find unfathomable.
With the pandemic worsening, U.S. lawmakers last year stepped in to offer fresh support. They tucked into the $900 billion stimulus adopted late in 2020 a program that will pay rebates to broadband customers facing serious economic hardship. The aid marks the first time the federal government has authorized such robust support to help Americans pay for Internet service and the devices needed to access it.
Distributing the aid swiftly represents a major, early test for Jessica Rosenworcel, tapped by President Biden as acting Democratic chair of the FCC last month. The agency has only weeks to start paying out benefits at a level and rate it has never been asked to do in its more than 90-year history. It could serve as a major referendum on the federal government itself, a chance for Washington to prove that it has learned the lessons of Lifeline — and can address shortcomings in helping Americans get online.
“We have an opportunity with the emergency broadband benefit to develop policies to get more households connected and then use what we learn from that process to inform what’s been our program in the past, and that’s Lifeline,” Rosenworcel said in an interview. “This program can help.”
The payments, which will be made directly to providers, could start by the end of this month. But the money is likely to last only a few months, and that has already touched off a lobbying blitz over what, if anything, should replace it.
On one side are AT&T, Verizon and other telecom giants, which say they support the push for universal service yet object to the way Lifeline is administered and funded. Many of these telecom giants argue through their primary lobbying arm, the trade group USTelecom, that Congress should finance phone and broadband benefits for low-income Americans on its own. That would allow these companies to strip the fees from customers’ bills that currently fund Lifeline — a move that would appear to lower subscribers’ monthly bills unless the telecom giants sought to raise prices later.
“The funding mechanism is really broken,” said Donna Epps, the senior vice president for public policy at Verizon. “We’re not suggesting eliminate it. We’re suggesting expanding and enhancing the resources the country provides to low-income people by adding a program that would provide greater subsidies and be federally funded.”
But the idea has drawn early opposition from those who advocate on behalf of Lifeline’s beneficiaries as well as Democratic policymakers, who say that a yearly fight over telecom aid would subject the much-needed money to the whims of Washington politics. Nor have they backed plans to impose new taxes or fees on other digital services, even if doing so might better fund the government’s attempts to boost broadband.
Olivia Wein, a staff attorney for the National Consumer Law Center, said she feared that Lifeline could face the same fights that plague the annual funding for home energy assistance and many other federal aid programs.
“States don’t know unless Congress passes appropriations in a timely fashion, which rarely ever happens, how much funding they’re going to have,” she said. “When [telecom] companies say appropriations, I don’t know if they’ve really thought that through.”
“I feel we need to have a real conversation about what the program covers,” Wein said, “so we don’t have a subpar service just because somebody does not have great wealth.”
Source: Washington Post