This 26-year-old federal fund evolved to fight the ‘digital divide.’ Now a court might throw it out.

Over the past 26 years, the Universal Service Fund — a federal subsidy pool collected monthly from American telephone customers — has spent close to $9 billion a year to give Americans better phone and internet connections, wiring rural communities in Arkansas, inner-city neighborhoods in Chicago, and public libraries and schools across the country. Now it faces the biggest crisis of its existence, and Congress appears paralyzed in the effort to fix it. The fund, paid for with a surcharge on phone bills, could be America’s most important tool going forward to fix the so-called digital divide, the huge split in opportunity between Americans who have fast internet access and those who don’t. Such access is a bipartisan issue, benefiting both red-state rural communities and blue-leaning urban neighborhoods. But despite support from both influential Republican and Democratic politicians, the fund now faces significant court challenges, thanks to lawsuits by conservative activists who claim it’s an unconstitutional tax. Many observers think at least one of the cases has a chance of convincing some judges to kill the fund.