How long will Lifeline be allowed to keep failing?

[Commentary] Suppose you started a program to improve the reading abilities of the 80 percent of lower-income students who cannot read at grade level. This is a worthy cause, so let’s assume that you are spending more than $1 billion annually to fix this. Then someone studies the effectiveness of your program and finds: (1) The children who enroll already read at or above grade level, (2) the percentage of lower-income children reading below grade level has barely changed since you started, and (3) some of the people administering your program are stealing from it. Would you keep your program, or ditch it? If you were the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), you would probably keep it. At least, that is how the agency is treating its Lifeline program, which received another failing grade from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) in 2017.

The GAO had already given the program a failing grade seven years ago in 2010. As I have written before, a less complex, less costly, and less corruption-prone way to provide Lifeline’s income benefits would be to provide direct income subsidies to low-income households. This would save the FCC considerable time and effort that it currently devotes to patching Lifeline and would save the GAO the expense of giving the program another failing grade seven years from now.

[Mark Jamison is the Gunter Professor of the Public Utility Research Center at the University of Florida]