Upcoming policy issue

A year ago today, President Trump abruptly “canceled” the Digital Equity Act (DEA) for being a “woke handout.” The DEA, created by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act in 2021, directed funding to states, territories, and community organizations to address the Digital Divide and ensure that everyone has internet-enabled devices, reliable internet service, and the skills needed to use broadband to improve their lives.

On April 30, Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) introduced a bill that would require the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) to track the progress of the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment (BEAD) Program. This bill would require NTIA's top official—Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Communications and Information and NTIA Administrator Arielle Roth—to take several new steps: publish a public dashboard tracking each state's BEAD progress, build a tool to help states track federal permits needed by their subgrantees, improve federal agencies' complianc

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr has been promising a top-to-bottom review of the Universal Service Fund, and on April 29, the FCC released a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that looks specifically at the High-Cost fund mechanisms that provide ongoing subsidies to internet service providers operating in very rural markets. The High-Cost fund is the USF program that most people in the country (and even the industry) don’t understand.

For more than a decade, federal programs have relied on Federal Communications Commission (FCC) data to answer a deceptively simple question: who has broadband internet access and who does not? The answer determines where billions of dollars in federal infrastructure funding go. Getting it right matters enormously. Getting it wrong means money fails to reach places that need it most.

Anthropic is both a risk and a necessity to AI progress, at least in the White House's telling. That tension is shaping AI policy in real time, as the White House 

The Federal Communications Commission's Broadband Data Task Force (Task Force) and the Office of Economics and Analytics (OEA) launched the coverage restoration process, beginning on Thursday, May 7, 2026. The specifications for the data required by service providers seeking to restore coverage in the Broadband Data Collection (BDC) are available at: https://us-fcc.box.com/v/bdc-coveragerestoration-spec.

Keep Our Communities Connected (KOCC) and the Schools, Health, and Libraries Broadband (SHLB) Coalition launched the “Future of Universal Service Fund (USF) Reform Task Force." his cross-sector initiative aims to inform ongoing bipartisan and bicameral policy debates on the long-term sustainability of universal service programs that support broadband access for schools, libraries, rural communities, health providers, and low-income households.

The Federal Communications Commission ordered a review of all station licenses owned by ABC, an extraordinary move to pressure a major television network whose programming has frequently angered President Trump. The FCC said that the action was related to an investigation into ABC’s diversity and inclusion policies.

Several former Federal Communications Commissioners and staffers across parties are urging the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia to force a vote on the FCC’s news distortion policy, which they argue should be repealed after being abused by Chairman Brendan Carr. The group of petitioners asked the court to require the FCC to vote on a petition to repeal the News Distortion Policy.

Police in Virginia used a technique called geofencing to tap into Google's databases to find out who was near the scene of a bank robbery in the town of Midlothian, where a robber pulled out a gun and subsequently fled with $195,000. Geofencing allows the government to draw a virtual fence around a geographic area where a crime was committed.