You may have noticed that under corrupt Trumpist courts, if a regulator like the FCC engages in literally anything that threatens corporate power or aids workers, competition, or consumers (say, net neutrality, for example), or even school kids, it’s clearly illegal and a dramatic overreach of regulatory power.
If an agency does things like launch fake investigations into media companies because a comedian made fun of the president, illegally eliminate media consolidation limits, or threaten companies with costly investigations if they’re not sexist and racist enough, that’s considered good and normal.
The latest case in point: the Fifth Circuit last week casually beheaded the $9 billion FCC Universal Service Fund (USF) program, which helps fund broadband connectivity to predominately rural and lower-income schools, libraries, and communities (read: a lot of Trump’s constituents). Bush-era appointee Judge Edith Brown Clement insists the FCC acted illegally by creating the long-running, bipartisan fund:
“However, the FCC lacked legal authority in 1997 to establish the company, the Universal Service Administrative Co, to collect the funds and set contribution rates, said Judge Edith Brown Clement.
“Because Congress never specifically authorized the FCC to establish USAC, we hold that the agency violated the Government Corporation Control Act,” she wrote for a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.”
You can read the full ruling here or embedded below.
Quick background: the USF program applies a small surcharge on traditional phone lines to fund broadband expansion to unserved rural homes, schools, and libraries (of which the U.S. has a lot thanks to rampant telecom monopolization). With the death of landlines, there’s been a lot of debate about how to keep the program going (with, say, a small fee on broadband lines).
While the USF, like all government programs, hasn’t been absent of fraud (it’s almost always at the hands of poorly regulated private companies), it’s generally done a lot of good for people stuck on the wrong side of the digital divide. It helps fund the kind of boring, steady infrastructure work that doesn’t get headlines or get mentioned in books about “abundance.”
Enter Trumpism, which has been taking a merciless hatchet to absolutely any effort, anywhere across government, to try and ensure that Americans — whether rural Trump supporters, struggling school kids, or inner city urban residents — have affordable access to the internet.
The USF is technically overseen by the Universal Service Administrative Company (USAC), which has been tasked since 1998 with overseeing more than $9 billion in broadband subsidies annually.
Certain Trump Republicans had been pushing for the USF to be destroyed entirely, though that gambit was surprisingly scuttled by the Supreme Court in June of last year. That ruling overturned an earlier Fifth Circuit decision that the FCC’s funding mechanism employing mandatory contributions from telecoms companies had levied a “misbegotten tax” on consumers.
With that avenue of destruction scuttled by the Supreme Court, opponents of having a federal government that helps human beings have instead shifted toward claiming it’s the USAC that’s illegal and government “overreach.” I should note, both efforts are being spearheaded by a dodgy Republican pseudo “consumer group” dubbed “Consumers Research.”
The legal efforts to kill a popular bipartisan broadband subsidy program come as the Trump FCC under Brendan Carr have stated they’d like to dramatically revise or kill the program, something Carr has tried to claim is “a commonsense win for government efficiency and accountability.”
I suspect the whole legal assault is being coordinated to provide cover for Carr’s planned “reforms,” of the program, which I’d suspect (based on Carr’s history) are being organized by companies like AT&T and involve ensuring that if any subsidies do persist, accountability of them is less than ever.
I suspect the USF will survive in some form, though it will be shaped in service of telecom monopolies. The FCC could, for example, try to navigate the ruling by bringing USAC’s operations in house.
Meanwhile Republicans have taken a hatchet to broadband affordability programs across the board, including killing the FCC’s Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), which provided a $30 broadband discount for low-income Americans — and killing a program that provided free Wi-Fi to rural school kids at no additional cost to taxpayers.
The Trump admin also illegally dismantled the Digital Equity Act, which was a bare-bones effort to stop race and class discrimination in broadband upgrades, hijacked what could ultimately be billions in infrastructure bill broadband grants to the benefit of Elon Musk, and destroyed what’s left of U.S. federal consumer protection and corporate oversight, ensuring that big telecom giants like AT&T and Comcast face zero meaningful penalties should they rip you off.
This federal policy seppuku is then sold as “efficiency” and “policing waste” to a public that increasingly receives its “news” from a handful of consolidated corporations (only made possible by the simultaneous Republican assault on media consolidation limits and our corrupted courts).
Great stuff. Extremely heartwarming.
