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A group of moderate Democrats called on fellow House members to extend the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), originally enacted as a pandemic response, for another year amid broader efforts to get and keep low-income Americans online.
The New Democrat Coalition told House leaders, including new Speaker Mike Johnson, that any emergency supplemental funding package it passes should include $6 billion to continue the $30 monthly subsidies for households already receiving benefits like WIC, SNAP, and Medicaid.
“At the current rate of enrollment, the ACP’s funding will be exhausted as imminently as early next year,” they wrote in a Monday letter. “Failure to renew funding for the ACP would once again make low-cost broadband internet service unaffordable for millions of families, resulting in a significant loss of internet connectivity nationwide.”
The White House appealed to Congress last week, asking lawmakers to rejuvenate the program, currently serving more than 21 million households, until next December, along with a slate of other government-funding requests. Doing so will not only keep disadvantaged Americans online, but also further a key tenet of the Biden administration’s plan to connect the entire country, the White House said.
The program initially came to life as a reaction to Covid-19 in 2021, at a time when Americans were adjusting to a new reality of working and learning from home and accomplishing most tasks virtually. It dovetails with the Federal Communication Commission’s preexisting Lifeline program, which offers a $9.25 per month discount on mobile and broadband plans to qualifying low-income households in a narrower slice of the population.
The ACP’s voucher-like system, which lets individual users choose their desired plan and provider and includes wide participation among ISPs, has made it popular even among conservatives who might generally oppose additional government spending. It’s also seen as a cleaner alternative to Lifeline—created during the Clinton administration but nicknamed “Obama phone” after its expansion in the 2010s—due to well-documented instances of Lifeline fraud.
All of these factors hint that there might be enough political goodwill to renew the program.
“I think there’s some bipartisan appetite here,” Jeffrey Westling, director of technology and innovation policy at center-right group American Action Forum, told Tech Brew. He noted, however, that Republicans will be more on board with spending if the scope of the program is narrowed.
“If anything is to pass, it’s going to take a lot of compromise in how the program is targeting the population that cannot afford broadband,” he said. “I think that conservatives would be OK with continuing that and letting it keep going.”
There’s also the question of whether Congress can pass an emergency domestic spending package at all while attention is focused on foreign aid packages for Ukraine and Israel.