Millions of older Americans receive federally funded discounts for high-speed internet, and AARP wants to ensure that support continues. We wrote to congressional lawmakers in favor of the Affordable Connectivity Extension Act of 2024. This new legislation would provide $7 billion in funding to ensure the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), which provides high-speed internet discounts, will continue past April. That’s when the project’s funding is predicted to run out. The program has helped more than 22 million lower-income households afford high-speed internet. Congress approved the ACP in 2021 as part of the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. “Everyone should have access to affordable, high-speed internet,” wrote Bill Sweeney, AARP senior vice president for government affairs, in January 9 letters to the bill’s House and Senate sponsors.

Continuation of the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) in some form seemed assured, and advocacy and industry groups support it, but opposition is growing. Opponents so far have been concentrating on the obvious:

• The ACP is indeed an entitlement, and non-discretionary entitlements (including Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid) are almost half the federal budget. “Discretionary” spending, except defense, contrary to what political ads say, have been slowly declining as a percent of the federal budget and now make up a total of about $800 billion out of $6 trillion. This is the money that goes through the annual congressional budget process and includes everything from border control to research, to paying government employees.
• The ACP funds, no matter how small in the overall budget, could quite possibly be used more effectively elsewhere, or not spent at all. We’re sending weapons and ammunition to Ukraine and Israel, for example.
• The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) have only a hazy idea of how to measure the ACP’s success and impact.

Opponents also have less obvious arguments: the ACP could be part of needed reform in the FCC’s existing subsidies, about $8 billion a year, which are currently funded by an ever-increasing fee on an ever-decreasing number of people using landline telephone service. A new sales tax on overall broadband and tech company services—voice, data, apps and so forth—would be more logical and result in a lower overall tax rate, although overall tax revenues would likely be doomed to increase. Some existing ACP recipients could likely afford to pay their own way, and many did so before ACP existed, at least at lower data rates.