Brendan Carr is blinding poor and rural children to score a deregulation talking point.
In 1996, Congress wrote E-Rate into the Telecommunications Act. The job was simple: route a portion of the fees collected by the federal Universal Service Fund to schools and libraries to defray their monthly internet bill. At the time, 14 percent of American schools and libraries could get online. The number is close to 100 now. The program has been overseen by FCC chairs of both parties. The Supreme Court ruled the funding mechanism constitutional last year. It is, by the standards of federal infrastructure programs, unusually bipartisan, unusually long-lived, and unusually well-documented as having done the thing it was built to do.
David Thurston oversees technology for the 33 school districts nested inside California’s San Bernardino County — a footprint that runs from the edge of Los Angeles to the state’s eastern border, 20,000 square miles of mountain, desert, and suburb. They built the fiber optic network to get internet from there to the state’s eastern border. But the fiber optic cables don’t pay themselves. “There’s no doing without,” Thurston told NPR. The cost is tens of thousands of dollars every month, per district, for the connection alone. That is what E-Rate pays for. The bill. The utility, the way electricity is a utility, the way a phone line used to be a utility. The line item has to come from somewhere else on the kitchen-table spreadsheet if the program goes away.
Patrick Mayer is the superintendent of the Alaska Gateway School District. It has just under 400 students across six schools. Some of his students fly to school in the winter. His district has one internet provider. “In rural Alaska, we don’t have numerous options,” he told NPR. His district spends more than half a million dollars a year just to keep the connection up. “It means the difference between having a school in the 21st century,” Mayer said, “or a school in the 20th.” If E-Rate shrinks, Mayer has to cut staff and student services to find the money. The dual-enrollment college course, the virtual speech therapy, the occupational therapy — they are the line items that go.
I know what happens when a school board’s budget takes a hit, because I sit at my own kitchen table at eleven at night, staring at the heating oil bill and running these same numbers for our local district. When the district’s budget takes a shock, it doesn’t mean “less screen time.” It means the special education aide gets laid off, compounding the harm in a district where school screen bans risk isolating millions of students with disabilities who rely on assistive tech. It means the pre-K program shrinks. It means the property taxes go up for the renters in Fishtown who don’t even have kids in the school. The kitchen-table spreadsheet doesn’t have a “magic internet money” column. The money comes from the same pool that pays for the heating oil and the paraprofessionals.
In late June, the FCC opened a formal review of the program. The reason the agency gave, in the notice of proposed rulemaking and in the chairman’s prepared remarks, was children’s screen time. The notice, as NPR reported, calls for a review “to better protect children when E-Rate-funded networks are used, including to limit screen time.” The screen-time concern is not nothing. Parents in my own text thread are worried about it. The Los Angeles Unified School District — the second-largest in the country — recently approved a policy to limit screen time for its students, and state legislatures in Alabama, Tennessee, Utah, and Virginia have passed restrictions in the last six months, with more than ten others considering them. The worry is real, and it has been real for years. But the worry is also a separate problem from the program. As Josh Grolin, the executive director of the child-safety nonprofit Fairplay, told NPR: “We believe there are ways of strengthening school policies to promote more limited and privacy-protecting use of EdTech without taking away critical E-Rate funding.” You can act on the screen-time concern without defunding the infrastructure. The chairman has chosen the second course.
The chairman of the FCC did not wake up one morning worried about eighth graders scrolling. He co-wrote the chapter of Project 2025 — the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for the second Trump administration — that specifically targeted federal broadband programs for cuts. He has been clear about his destination. The screen-time panic is the route. Historians of science Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway wrote the book on this kind of move in 2010, in Merchants of Doubt: you manufacture doubt about a successful program, attach a moral panic to the manufactured doubt, and ride the panic to defund. The pattern shows up the same way in pharmaceutical defenses, in climate denial, in school curriculum fights. You do not have to win the empirical argument. You have to put enough fog over the program that the defunding can be justified on “concern” grounds.
Heather McGhee has a name for the larger pattern. She calls it “the drained pool.” The federal government built public goods — the interstate highway system, the public university system, the GI Bill, public libraries, public schools — and then, when the obligation to share those goods across the color line and the income line became enforceable, the pool got drained. On purpose. E-Rate was a small piece of pool. It is the federal government putting a thin line of public money on a school district’s monthly bill so the school can keep its internet up. The chairman is now proposing to drain it, and the bucket he has chosen to sell the draining is “think of the children.”
The FCC can’t kill E-Rate outright. The program is written into the Telecommunications Act of 1996, and last year’s Supreme Court ruling affirming the Universal Service Fund’s constitutionality makes full elimination legally unviable. But Carr doesn’t have to kill it to break it. Bob Bocher of the American Library Association, who helped work on the original law in the 1990s, told NPR he worries the program could become so onerous that schools and libraries are driven away by design. “It’s like death by a thousand cuts,” he says, “death by a thousand rules and regulations.” It is the same deregulatory toolkit that has been deployed on every other piece of public infrastructure. You do not repeal the Clean Water Act; you make the permit so expensive to apply for that no small town can afford to file one. You do not repeal public schools; you drain their budgets until the districts cannot function. You do not repeal the program that connects rural Alaska to the rest of the country; you tie its funding to a moral panic about children’s screen time and let the panic do the work.
The constitutional-law scholar Derek Black has documented that public education is one of the founding commitments of this republic — written into state constitutions, embedded in the conditions under which states were admitted to the Union after the Civil War, the structural companion to the right to vote. E-Rate is one of the most recent installments in that line. The chairman’s review is a move against the line.
A friend of mine from college teaches seventh grade in a small district outside Allentown. She does not have time to read Project 2025. She has thirty-one students with IEPs, an IEP meeting on Thursday, and a wifi router that drops twice a day. The router is paid for, in part, by the same Universal Service Fund that pays for the wifi in San Bernardino and rural Alaska. If the chairman’s review succeeds, she will not get a letter explaining why. She will just find that next year’s application is harder, and the year after that harder, and the year after that, the program will be in name only.
A Taylor Swift song that has been in heavy rotation in my household this year is called “You’re On Your Own, Kid.” The title line is the song’s whole argument, and the song is, read one way, a piece of writing about a country: the adult world told you it would catch you, and it didn’t. The friendship-bracelets redemption in the bridge is the speaker’s recognition that the only safety net actually delivered was lateral — the other kids in the bleachers. Read against a federal program designed, line item by line item, to stop the catching from failing, the song is, line by line, what it sounds like when the catching stops. If the FCC guts E-Rate, the Alaska Gateway district is on its own. The San Bernardino districts are on their own. The library in Lansdale where my mother used to take me for story time is on its own. The infrastructure that was built in the nineties to get us from fourteen percent connectivity to near-universal access is being told that it was always just a luxury.
My grandmother used to teach the old rule of mercy: you don’t just hand out the coat, you build the world where the neighbor doesn’t freeze in the first place. The corporal works of mercy, the list she used to recite at the kitchen table on Sunday afternoons — feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, visit the sick — were not abstractions. They were operationalized through the parish. They were paid for, in part, by the voluntary contributions of working-class families who had very little. The modern version of those voluntary contributions, on the scale of a country of 330 million people, is the federal tax dollar — the small fraction that the E-Rate program routes to a rural Alaska district’s monthly internet bill. The chairman is now proposing to defund that small fraction. He is doing so behind a children’s-screen-time panic that he did not invent but has been willing to use.
E-Rate is the structural version of the old rule. It is the recognition that in 2026, you can’t participate in the world — you can’t take one of the mandatory online state exams now required in 48 states, you can’t do a dual-enrollment college course, you can’t do occupational therapy — if you don’t have the wire. Taking it away isn’t protecting the kids. It’s just locking the door and calling it a screen. The panic is real. The defunding is the policy. The two are not the same program, and the chairman knows it.