Reducing the broadband affordability gap is an important and noble goal. The basic tenet of universal internet service—that the government should assist those who cannot afford basic access to the network—has long been a cornerstone of American telecommunications policy and takes on increased significance in the digital age.

Unfortunately, it is far from clear whether Lifeline, the federal program tasked with getting low-income households online, actually addresses this problem. For more than a decade, academics, government watchdogs, and independent auditors have criticized the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) inability or unwillingness to measure the program’s effectiveness—while private studies suggest much of this spending may be misdirected toward families at no risk of losing internet access.

In an article published today as part of the AEI Digital Platforms and American Life Project, I wrote about the importance of assessing Lifeline and other broadband affordability initiatives.

Despite Lifeline’s longevity and the amount of money it disburses each year, the FCC has never shown that the subsidy has any measurable effect on low-income adoption rates. The Government Accountability Office (GAO), which monitors federal spending and program performance, has issued at least three reports in the past decade challenging the agency to study the program’s effectiveness. “Without a program evaluation,” the GAO wrote in 2015, “FCC does not know whether Lifeline is effectively ensuring the availability of telephone service for low-income households while minimizing program costs.”

Rather than pinpointing those Americans most in need and giving them the resources necessary to get them online, Lifeline paints with a broad brush, spreading nearly a billion dollars annually among millions of households in the hope that some of this money will somehow help reduce the broadband gap.

But don’t take my word for it: A 2020 independent audit by Grant Thornton emphasized this conclusion:

From 2012 through 2020, the broadband penetration rate for low-income households increased. But Lifeline participation rates have decreased over the comparable period, from 36 percent in 2015 to 24 percent in 2019. Overall, the report concluded, there is “no evidence to attribute the increase in broadband penetration rate for low-income consumers directly to the Lifeline program,” and consequently the report could not determine “whether or not the Lifeline program has improved access to voice and broadband services for low-income consumers.”

The need to assess these affordability programs takes on greater importance with the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), a post-pandemic initiative that can be viewed as Lifeline on steroids. ACP spends more money—$14 billion—on a broader swath of households. And while it avoids some of the paternalism of earlier initiatives, it replicates Lifeline’s basic flaw: spending broadly based on untested assumptions regarding which households lack broadband service and why—and without a plan to measure the program’s effectiveness.

As my report discusses, there is a better way.

Rather than simply offering an arbitrary amount in assistance to anyone who qualifies for other forms of government assistance, the FCC should identify and survey low-income households that currently lack broadband, to identify these families’ characteristics and ascertain the barriers to adoption. With the results of this study, the agency then could design eligibility criteria that target low-income non-adopters in particular, rather than continuing Lifeline’s scattershot program of aiding all low-income households broadly. A data-driven, narrowly tailored set of eligibility criteria could go far toward answering perhaps the most significant criticism of Lifeline and ACP—namely, that they risk squandering large amounts of subsidy dollars on households that would have bought internet access even without the subsidy.

You can read the full study here. It is the latest in a series of reports in the AEI Digital Platforms and American Life Project, published with support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

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