The Affordable Connectivity Program that’s taken $30 a month off the broadband bills of tens of millions of lower-income Americans since 2022 is only weeks from becoming legislative abandonware. But the Biden administration isn’t done trying to get Congress to reboot funding for this subsidy. Yes, even this infamously unproductive Congress.“We know that affordable and reliable high-speed internet is essential to life in the 21st century,” Jon Donenberg, deputy director of the White House’s National Economic Council, said in an interview Friday. “Which is why the Affordable Connectivity Program was created in the first place.”He emphasized how far ACP funding has reached across the US—23,269,550 households had signed up by the time the FCC closed enrollment in March in advance of the expected exhaustion of its budget after Congress didn’t renew funding. The last ACP benefits go out in May, reduced to $14 a month for most people.“These are people who are in every Congressional district in the country, they’re in every state in the country,” Donenberg said, noting that nearly half are military families. “It is an American issue, and it is a non-partisan issue.” The program was open to households with an income no more than double federal poverty guidelines or that met such other criteria as participating in Medicaid or having a child receiving free or reduced-cost school lunches. The rules are more generous than those of the older, still-funded Lifeline subsidy, and ACP’s benefit of up to $30/month (up to $75 on qualifying Tribal lands) is also more generous than the $9.25 a month Lifeline typically allots.But an ACP-renewal bill introduced in January has gone nowhere despite its bipartisan sponsorship and what Donenberg described as “a lot of bipartisan conversation around ACP” that has yet to be matched by support from Republican leadership. In a December letter to FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel, Sens. John Thune (R-SD) and Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Reps. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA) and Bob Latta (R-OH) called the program “wasteful,” citing government surveys finding that as little as 16% of ACP recipients lacked home broadband prior to signing up for the program.Donenberg did not have any predictions to share about how many people might drop broadband after losing ACP subsidies, calling that “an open question” but he suggested that millions of them would wind up with higher bills or worse service. Other Biden appointees, however, have suggested that an ACP shutdown would not only lead to large-scale unplugging but could threaten the business plans of ISPs that are building out their networks with $42 billion in federal broadband-expansion subsidies. Some providers have taken their own steps to deal with the possible demise of the ACP. AT&T announced April 4 that it would keep offering the $30/month Access from AT&T plan that it had introduced weeks after the program’s launch—one of many $30 offerings that providers rolled out to make their service free to ACP recipients.
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And Charter Communications, among the top recipients of ACP funding, has a page on its Spectrum service’s site through which customers can message their representatives in Congress. “Yes, we have seen a lot of interest in this from the ISPs,” Donenberg said. “I think that they understand how critical this program is for their customers.”Some broadband-equity advocates have suggested that a renewal of the ACP should come with a merger of it and Lifetime to simplify government efforts. Donenberg called that a fair subject for debate—after Congress first rescues the expiring program by giving it enough money to operate through the rest of 2024.“We are certainly interested in exploring every option that’s available, but it’s also important not to lose sight of the moment that we’re in right now,” he said. “Then take the time that we need and that we would have with an extension to the end of the year to answer some of these bigger questions.”
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