Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr wants to kill off a scheme that gives poor kids internet access.
For those not in the know, E-Rate has been around since 1997 and gives schools and libraries discounts on telecom services, internet access and kit.
The agency voted 2-1 on 25 June 2026 to issue a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that could scale back or kill the $2bn-a-year scheme.
Carr said schools had spent the past decade stuffing children in front of screens instead of books and pencils when they should be working down mines or up chimneys [we made the last bit up].
“Over the last decade, school districts across the country experimented with a massive increase in screen time for students,” Carr said.
He said more than half of students use a computer for up to four hours a day, while a quarter spend more than four hours on screens.
Carr said E-Rate started with “a clear focus” on basic internet access for schools and libraries, but had “expanded exponentially”.
The public draft asks whether E-Rate should be limited or sunset, given that schools and libraries are now much better connected.
FCC commissioner Anna Gomez asked Carr’s office to remove the language about sunsetting E-Rate.
Carr’s office declined because apparently the bit about killing the thing was deliberate.
Gomez said the proceeding had been “erroneously portrayed as an inquiry into screen time” while floating cuts to a connectivity programme.
She said the proposals showed “a fundamental misunderstanding of the challenges schools and libraries face today and reveal a striking cognitive dissonance at the core of this item.”
Gomez said poorer and rural children still need the programme so they get the same shot at a digital education.
“The FCC is not the nation’s parent. It is not the nation’s teacher. And it is not the nation’s school board,” Gomez said.
She said Congress never asked the agency to narrow the programme or tie connectivity funding to someone’s pet screen-time theory.
US senator Ed Markey said the proposal “goes far beyond reviewing the impact of screen time on students and undermines educational equality, harms our economic competitiveness, and threatens to reverse three decades of settled law.”
Markey said the FCC should strengthen E-Rate and close the digital divide, not hunt for new excuses to disconnect needy children.
The programme usually hands out more than $2bn a year, although its funding cap is $5.2bn.
It is funded through Universal Service Fund charges slapped on phone companies, which usually pass the bill to customers.
Carr’s FCC has already chopped E-Rate funding for Wi-Fi hotspot lending by schools and libraries.
It has axed Wi-Fi support on school buses too, a move backed by US senator Ted Cruz and called “cruel” by advocates.
Schools, Health & Libraries Broadband Coalition executive director Joey Wender said the FCC should be asking how to strengthen E-Rate, not terminate it.
Wender called the vote “an attack on school and library funding that these institutions can’t afford to lose, particularly in the most disadvantaged rural and urban communities.”
