Universal Service Fund

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai announced that a majority of Commissioners have voted in favor of his proposal to increase funding for the Universal Service Fund’s Rural Health Care Program by $171 million a year. “Telemedicine is vital in many communities that may not otherwise have access to high-quality health care, and the Federal Communications Commission has an important role in promoting it. I want to thank Commissioners O’Rielly and Carr for their support as the FCC takes the critical step of updating its Rural Health Care Program.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai sent a letter to Rep. Raul Ruiz (D-CA) and 31 other members of Congress on June 1, 2018, to respond to their letter that urged the FCC to halt its effort to cut off support for low-income tribal families through proposed changes to the Tribal Lands Lifeline program.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai sent letters to Rep. Bobby Rush (D-IL) and six other members of Congress and Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-CA) and 67 members of Congress on June 1, 2018, to respond to their letters regarding the Lifeline program. Chairman Pai said the 2017 Lifeline Order increased consumer choice by eliminating restrictions that barred Lifeline consumers from changing Lifeline providers for a year and protected consumers by barring low-quality services that offered mobile broadband in theory, but failed to do so in practice.

The Federal Communications Commission set aside enforcement of rules, granting a petition for forbearance that will, in effect, waive the requirement for small, rural carriers to contribute to the Universal Service Fund on their broadband Internet access transmission service revenues.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai announced that he has circulated a draft order to his colleagues that would take immediate action to significantly increase funding for the Universal Service Fund’s Rural Health Care Program. The program’s current annual funding cap is $400 million. The cap was set in 1997 and was never indexed for inflation. Recently, demand for funding under the program has outpaced the budget, creating uncertainty for patients, health care providers, and communications companies alike.

When the National Network to End Domestic Violence polled nearly 300 domestic violence prevention programs, it found that 77 percent of domestic violence prevention programs distributed phones. These phones included devices from a program run by the Federal Communications Commission: Lifeline. But the FCC has proposed dramatically cutting the Lifeline program. It has announced plans to gut the service for 70 percent of current users. To justify these cuts, the agency says that because some phone companies abused the program by enrolling ineligible consumers, the program doesn’t work.

The Federal Communications Commission needs to fix a “flaw” in the online enrollment system for the Lifeline subsidy program that could hurt rural and other customers signing up for discounted phone service offered to low-income consumers, Q Link Wireless LLC recently told senior agency staffers. Q Link executives, including President Paul Turner, met with FCC representatives on May 23 to argue for including “application programming interfaces” in the national Lifeline verifier.

Republican and Democratic senators are expressing concerns about the coverage map the Federal Communications Commission is planning to use to decide where to put more than $4.5 billion in rural broadband subsidies, and they want more time to challenge the agency's findings.

Sens Tom Udall (D-NM) and Cory Gardner (R-CO) introduced a bill to put wireless internet on school buses in order to help students without broadband access at home get online to study and do homework.

More and more, rural hospitals and clinics rely on high-speed internet access to bridge the urban-rural gap and provide their patients with services that are often found only in much larger cities. But a federal program to help subsidize the cost of broadband for rural health care facilities has hit its funding cap, which may jeopardize the push to connect more rural health facilities.