Rosenworcel Vows Further ACP Updates to Aid Hill Funding Push

The FCC will continue updating Congress about the affordable connectivity program's status in hopes of convincing lawmakers for money to keep it running, Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel told reporters Thursday after the commissioners’ open meeting (see 2401250064). The FCC expects the initiative will exhaust its $14.2 billion allocation in April. The Wireline Bureau said earlier this month it would freeze new enrollments Feb. 8 as part of the program's wind-down process (see 2401110072).

Senate Commerce Committee Chair Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., and others are considering the possibility of reconfiguring a broader spectrum legislative package to allow future auction sales proceeds to pay for ACP. Cantwell emphasized that notion remains in the planning stages. Some congressional Republicans are becoming more vocal in support of appropriating stopgap money for ACP to keep it running during FY 2024. They acknowledge that GOP leaders’ push to couple that funding with a revamp of the initiative’s rules could complicate negotiations.

ACP has been a “tremendous program” so far and “even as we have to take … responsible steps to look at how we wind it down, we want to make sure Congress understands the good this program is doing so” it can continue, Rosenworcel told reporters. She pushed back in a response earlier this month to a letter from top Republicans on the House and Senate Commerce committees that accused the FCC in December of making misleading claims about ACP’s efficacy (see 2312150068). Rosenworcel told the GOP leaders the commission “cannot condition” ACP support to qualifying households “on additional factors or other data collection” beyond what the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act mandated.

Cantwell said ACP is “one of the things” she would like to explore using future sales revenue as part of a broader spectrum legislative package, but it’s still too early to say whether that makes it into a revised deal lawmakers are exploring in the wake of DOD’s study of how commercial 5G use on the 3.1-3.45 GHz band would affect incumbent military users (see 2312040001). The entire appropriations “process is up in the air” until congressional leaders agree on how to divide the $1.66 trillion they agreed to as the top line FY24 budget figure among the 12 appropriations bills covering federal spending, Cantwell said.

Legislative Reexamination

“We need new numbers” from the Congressional Budget Office that factor in the DOD study before it's clear how much auction revenue could be available to pay for ACP and other projects, Cantwell told us. Lower 3 GHz auction opponents believe the DOD study’s negative assessment of a lower 3 GHz auction dooms prospects (see 2311290001) for enacting the House Commerce Committee-cleared Spectrum Auction Reauthorization Act (HR-3565), which Cantwell backed. The measure proposed using some revenue from a lower 3 GHz auction to pay for telecom projects, including to pay back a potential $3.08 billion loan to fully fund the FCC’s Secure and Trusted Communications Networks Reimbursement Program. Lawmakers are exploring other options for addressing the rip-and-replace funding shortfall (see 2401240001).

ACP and rip and replace are "important programs” that need more funding, but “I’ve been more focused on” reaching a deal on the additional ACP money given the limited time left before its current funding is set to expire, said Senate Appropriations Financial Services Subcommittee Chairman Chris Van Hollen, D-Md. Future “spectrum auction revenue should also be used” to fund ACP and “I’m going to be talking to my colleagues” about “merging” funding for the affordability initiative into the spectrum bill talks. “We’ll see how” potential revisions of Democrats’ preferred spectrum legislative framework would affect future auction revenue, he told us. Lobbyists we spoke with noted chatter that some lawmakers are mulling introducing a stand-alone bill that would marry ACP and spectrum policy priorities.

Senate Communications Subcommittee ranking member John Thune of South Dakota told us he hasn’t examined Cantwell’s proposal, but he and other Republicans “have other ideas” about spending auction proceeds that diverge from what House Commerce proposed in HR-3565 (see 2306120058). “It would be really good to actually have a conversation about how to use the revenues off spectrum sales” given that disagreement, he said.

House Communications Subcommittee Chairman Bob Latta, R-Ohio, divulged little about the outcome of a DOD-Commerce Department briefing for House Commerce members last week on the lower 3 GHz study (see 2401170084), saying it involved classified information. “We’re staying where we are” on the broad contours of what HR-3565 proposed, including language to restore the FCC’s lapsed overall spectrum auction authority, following that meeting, Latta told us. “We’ll leave for the future” a decision on “which bands” a spectrum package would authorize selling.

Thune remains skeptical about giving ACP stopgap funding but didn’t rule it out. “We’re trying to get some answers about how” ACP recipients are spending the money “and hopefully we can get those questions answered before making decisions about whether or how to keep the program going,” he said. Latta said he and other members of the working group, Thune and Senate Communications Chairman Ben Ray Lujan, D-N.M., formed last year to evaluate moving forward on a comprehensive USF revamp (see 2305110066) haven’t reached a consensus on how ACP should fit into that work.

Rising GOP Interest?

Rep. Yvette Clarke, D-N.Y., who spearheaded filing the ACP Extension Act (HR-6929/S-3565) earlier this month in a bid to infuse $7 billion into the program for FY24 (see 2401100056), is optimistic enough GOP lawmakers will see the political benefit of backing the funding stopgap. President Joe Biden in October called for $6 billion in additional money (see 2310250075), but Clarke said she and other lawmakers are seeking funding $1 billion above that level to ensure robust coverage for the rest of 2024.

“I’m hoping that we can fast-track this” via the appropriations process “because the last things we need are for this program to end and the disruption that comes with having to do a wind-down” that would affect an estimated 25 million participants when funding expires, Clarke told us. “There’s not a congressional district in the country that is not going to be impacted by this. It’s been a lifeline for many families in rural communities” that Republicans represent.

“We can’t” achieve the type of universal connectivity in the U.S. that lawmakers intended in IIJA without sustaining ACP, said House Communications ranking member Doris Matsui, D-Calif. The ACP wind-down plans the FCC publicized in recent weeks “greatly worry me.” She recognizes the commission must plan for the possibility of funding exhaustion, but “once you wind something like that down, it’s really hard to ramp up again. It’s very difficult” to get participants reenrolled in such a situation.

GOP skepticism about ACP “could be an impediment” to getting the program more money, but conversely, it “could be the impetus for continuing it” in an improved form, said S-3565 co-sponsor Sen. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D. “I’d like to see the program continue” and if Thune and other GOP leaders on the Commerce committees decide “changes to the program are necessary,” either in tandem with additional appropriations or after a stopgap, “then all the better.”

Senate Appropriations Committee member Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., supports providing some stopgap funding that will keep ACP alive while lawmakers negotiate changes to the program’s rules. ACP is “critical for people in my state,” said Capito, who’s also a Senate Commerce member. “I do think this would be a good chance to … narrow the focus of who’s getting” the program’s benefit, because it’s “too wide-open right now.”