Supreme Court Takes a Close Look at USF Contributions
It was to be one hour of oral arguments about the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC’s) Universal Service Fund (USF) program, considering whether Congress delegated too much of its authority when it created the program in the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Instead, U.S. Supreme Court justices spent more than two and a half hours peppering attorneys with questions about the nature of USF, whether the statute fails to set limits on the amount of funding it can collect and whether those fees are, in fact, taxes on the American public that Congress never debated.
