Tech

Brendan Carr Declares War on Poor People

The Lifeline program helps low-income families stay connected. So, of course, the Trump FCC hates it.

When the sordid history of Brendan Carr’s FCC is written, you can be sure it will include the boldface names — the fights picked with Jimmy Kimmel and The View, his pressure on 60 Minutes and his cartoon avatar drowning in used kitty litter. They’ll note his sycophantic performances for Donald Trump and Elon Musk and his right-wing podcast rants.

But the rot and damage go much deeper: obliterating the agency’s independence, launching racist attacks on diversity programs, unconstitutional government censorship, and waiving through merger after merger. In Carr’s latest pitiless scheme, he’s making it even harder for the poorest among us to access basic communications.

June 2 is the deadline for public comments in the FCC’s proceeding to ”reform and modernize” the Lifeline program — the largely successful initiative established during the Reagan era to help low-income families afford phone service.

But don’t let the bureaucratic niceties fool you: Carr is trying to demonize immigrants and deny millions of Americans benefits they’re entitled to. In the Hall of Shame that he’s turning the FCC into, this effort ranks right up there with his most disingenuous and cruel ideas.

The FCC’s scare tactics

Though Lifeline is a vital public-assistance program, policymakers have often placed it in jeopardy to score political points. Carr himself has repeatedly attacked the program and proposed changes to try to discourage people from applying for Lifeline benefits.

He wants you to believe that Lifeline is plagued with illegal payments to “unlawful aliens” scamming cellphone companies to obtain a bare-bones mobile voice and data plan. But he presents cherry-picked evidence of fraud — which, where it exists, implicates carriers, not consumers — and his solutions are untethered from reality. And Carr has provided zero evidence that any undocumented people are misusing the program.

Given the outsized attention Carr’s vague allegations of fraud gets, you might think the program is in crisis. The reality is much less salacious: The Lifeline program has generally achieved its aims and is, if anything, underutilized.

But the FCC’s scaremongering is meant to create a climate of fear that keeps people from participating in public life — and accessing critical governmental services.

As Free Press detailed in recent comments filed with the agency, Carr’s proposal would set up unnecessary new restrictions and force applicants to disclose more private information; it also wouldn’t actually save money or keep undocumented people off the rolls (they’re already excluded). But it would cause a chilling effect and discourage people from applying because they fear that the simple act of signing up for a benefit might result in their unlawful arrest or deportation.

“The proposal before us is just the next move in a systemic effort by this Administration to eviscerate federal support for low-income consumers across the country,” said Democratic FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez. “This is not a war on poverty. It is a war on the poor.”

What serious reform would look like

Despite all the misleading noise surrounding Lifeline, the data tell a far different story. Lifeline is essential to keeping the most vulnerable among us connected. It protects low-income families from having to forgo other necessities just to maintain access to essential communications services.

The FCC created the Lifeline program in 1985 to ensure that low-income consumers would not lose basic local telephone service as the country navigated the transition away from the national AT&T monopoly. As people later gave up landlines for mobile phones, the program shifted — and found a real public need. The number of Lifeline enrollees increased from 6.9 million in 2008 to a high of 17 million in 2012.

Now the program serves 8 million households, with only about one-in-five eligible households participating. As an internet connection has become ever-more important, the Lifeline program hasn’t kept up.

Policymakers should learn lessons from this history. To succeed, any subsidy program must meet individual needs and have flexibility baked in. Some Lifeline subscribers might need just a bare-bones wireless voice service they can use occasionally and in case of emergency. Others might find greater utility if they can use their subsidy to lower the monthly cost of a smartphone voice/SMS/data plan. Still others could use help making broadband more affordable so their children have the internet access needed to complete their homework.

If we were serious about reforming Lifeline, we would design a broader subsidy that responded to consumer needs and individual preferences in service of the still-worthy goal of making all telecommunications services more affordable for low-income Americans. We would learn from the undeniable success of the short-lived Affordable Connectivity Program, which helped tens of millions of families get online during the COVID pandemic. And we would recognize that the most useful programs allow users to apply benefits toward the services that best meet their needs; they encourage participation from more service providers and they do real outreach to eligible households.

Carr wrecks

Unfortunately, the Trump administration doesn’t care about serious policymaking. Carr’s proposed changes to the Lifeline program are just empty partisan gestures driven by his desire to please the White House above all else. That entails attacking the president’s perceived enemies: immigrants, poor people and government programs that could actually help them.

“As an independent agency,” Gomez says, “the FCC should not be weaponizing its regulatory authority to advance unrelated immigration policies to score points with this Administration, particularly when doing so conflicts with the expertise and institutional knowledge of the agency.”

But Carr has abandoned any pretense of agency independence or expert analysis. He runs the FCC to further Trump’s demagoguery. So while there may be many ways to improve Lifeline, they will have to wait for a time when the agency once again has a leader with intellectual and moral integrity.

Until then, the best and only thing to do with the Lifeline program is to leave it alone.

About the authors

Craig Aaron is the co-CEO of Free Press and Free Press Action and a guy with two first names. Follow him on Bluesky.

S. Derek Turner leads Free Press’ research and policy analysis and is a senior advisor to the co-CEOs and policy team. Since joining Free Press full time in 2006, Derek’s landmark research has revealed racial inequities in the digital divide, investigated the dismal state of media ownership among women and people of color, and exposed waste in federal broadband programs.

Teamwork

Compiled by Pressing Issues editors

Watch this. The official kickoff of the Solidarity Over Surveillance campaign — which Pressing Issues previewed last Friday — is happening tomorrow. Join us on Wed., June 3, at 3 p.m. ET for an insightful online discussion about how government agencies and corporations are using surveillance to repress dissent and target marginalized communities. Speakers include UCLA Professor Safiya Noble, journalist Memo Torres of L.A. Taco, Chad Marlow of the ACLU, and Free Press’ Nora Benavides and Amanda Beckham. RSVP here to participate.

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