Scott Wallsten

Last week I finished a hundred-page empirical report on four federal and two state broadband subsidy programs. It found that the programs mostly paid for service that was coming anyway, and that the ones with credible comparison groups bought a year or so of earlier service at a few thousand dollars per location per year. A project like that would once have taken me a year with a research assistant.

Governments spend billions of dollars to bring broadband to places that lack it. This report asks how much of the new service in the places six programs came from the subsidies, and how much would have arrived anyway. We compare the areas each program funded with similar areas it did not fund, track both over time, and call the difference the program’s effect. The main measure is access, whether a location can buy at least 100/20 Mbps from a wired or licensed wireless provider.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr has called for a “top-to-bottom” review of the Universal Service Fund. His best defensive move is to preserve a rare USF success that happened 15 years ago and has quietly reduced the real burden of High Cost support. His more ambitious task is to confront the political economy that blocks structural reform and leaves rural customers dependent on permanently subsidized providers.

Like many, I’ve had frustrating experiences with offshore call centers, repeating my account number to someone reading from a script who cannot solve my problem.

On March 23, the Federal Communications Commission effectively banned all new foreign-made routers from the U.S. commercial market by adding them to its so-called “covered list.” The action followed a White House-convened interagency National Security Determination issued just three days earlier. The FCC took this action with no notice-and-comment proceeding, no published cost-benefit analysis, and without providing a broad transition process for the affected industry.

The National Policy Framework for Artificial Intelligence is silent on whether and how to govern the trajectory of AI development itself. It says nothing about frontier model safety evaluation, responsible scaling, international coordination on development risks, or verification mechanisms.

Artificial intelligence presents genuinely novel governance challenges. Its combination of rapid capability growth, omni-use applications, and nearly free proliferation is inconsistent with templates designed for other technologies that may have dangerous applications. Recent attempts to govern AI development have had mixed results, with many proposals vetoed, revoked, weakened, or still searching for enforcement mechanisms. The deeper problem is not political will. It is that the analytical foundations for thinking rigorously about AI governance do not yet exist.

In conversation with Technology Policy Institute's Scott Wallsten, Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Communications and Information Arielle Roth admitted that the spectrum implementation puzzle is harder than the legislation suggested. Assistant Secretary Roth said that as a Senate staffer drafting the spectrum provisions, she had “more of an impatient approach to spectrum identification.” On the implementation side, she’s discovered that some federal systems slated for relocation don’t yet have specifications for their replacement equipment, that agencies face competing cost and timeline

The Internet protocol (IP) interconnection transition generates unavoidable costs for intercarrier compensation (ICC)-dependent rural carriers, and deferring those costs to “future proceedings” predictably leads to pressure for permanent new Universal Service Fund (USF) support. The Technology Policy Institute proposes a Voluntary IP Service Transition Auction (VISTA) that converts those implicit future liabilities into explicit, time-limited transition payments.

A funny thing happened over Labor Day weekend. Journalist Ted Hearn emailed us a thoughtful question about a piece we wrote on BEAD spending incentives. We took time to craft a serious response explaining the economics.