The United States is a global technology leader, yet millions of Americans lack the internet access, devices, or skills to benefit from its technological capabilities or participate fully in the digital economy. Recognizing this divide in 2021, Congress passed the largest federal investment in broadband in U.S. history, encompassing both the Broadband, Equity, Access, and Deployment Program and the Digital Equity Act. Together, these measures aim to expand broadband access and infrastructure while ensuring that people have the skills and resources needed to adopt and use these technologies. But the two have come under increased scrutiny during the second Trump administration, which in May 2025 moved to terminate the Digital Equity Act’s grant programs, arguing that the programs’ consideration of certain historically “underserved” ethnic and racial groups was unconstitutional. As a result, the National Digital Inclusion Alliance filed a lawsuit seeking to restore the program. During litigation, government attorneys argued that the program should only be allowed to continue if the act’s race-related provisions were removed from the statute. And on July 15, a judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia agreed, claiming that the statute’s racial provisions were unconstitutional and should be severed from the act as a whole. But race cannot and should not be ignored in digital access conversations, and the courts’ striking of racial provisions undermines the act’s recognition of key barriers to broadband access and reasons for digital exclusion among racial and ethnic groups.

[August 25, 2026]

The acrimonious breakup between Anthropic and the Department of Defense played out largely in public. But despite the high-profile salvos between the artificial intelligence giant and the Pentagon, ostensibly over the ethics of 21st-century warfare and corporate power, their actual falling out hinged on a government contract that has remained hidden away. Through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit conducted with the help of Legal Advocates for Safe Science and Technology, The Intercept obtained more than 400 pages of documents related to the U.S. military’s contracts with Anthropic and its chief competitors. They illuminate the surprisingly intimate relationship between Big Tech and the armed forces, and reveal new insights about the deals that led to the Anthropic crisis earlier this year.

The first 19 months of the Trump Federal Communications Commission have changed the nature of the agency. For most of its history, the FCC was a policy-driven body existing in an inevitably political environment. Under the Trump administration, it has become a politics-driven agency employing policy as an instrument. Once an independent agency accountable to Congress, the FCC lost that independence when President Donald Trump issued an executive order requiring the FCC and other formerly independent agencies to submit to White House supervision. The agency subsequently deleted the word “independent” from its website description. Confirming his agency’s new lack of independence, Chairman Brendan Carr testified to Congress, “The FCC is not an independent agency, formally speaking. How the no-longer independent agency has exercised its new role is distinctly Trumpian.