Why didn’t the CARES Act solve the digital divide?

Although President Biden has just signed the American Rescue Plan Act (including $7 billion in E-rate funding) into law, some believe that the March 2020 Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act already took care of the connectivity gap. How did states use CARES Act funding to improve broadband for unserved and underserved Americans? In short, approximately $3.28 billion from the CARES Act went toward this goal, funneled through three different sources: 

• General COVID-19 relief funding was allocated to states and Tribes, each of which could use the amount for broadband at their discretion.
• States could apply for emergency education funds, managed by the Department of Education. Many states used some of this funding for broadband.
• Existing programs, including the Federal Communications Commission’s COVID-19 Telehealth program and the ReConnect program within the Department of Agriculture (USDA), also got a funding boost from the CARES Act.

43 states used some CARES Act funding for broadband, in addition to the two federal programs administered by the FCC and USDA. For the purposes of this analysis, we’ve categorized the funding into five broadband-related buckets: Digital learning, infrastructure, telehealth, libraries, and other broadband spending. The biggest revelation: Over half of the spending focused on digital learning for K-12 students, while a third was spent on broadband infrastructure. All in all, it seems that officials placed a higher priority on immediate impact activity – digital learning – instead of focusing on long-term broadband deployment to address the digital divide.