[News] Trump Wants to Keep America Digitally Divided

The following article originally appeared in The Progressive Magazine:

On May 8, President Donald Trump announced his intention to end the Digital Equity Act, which established funding for programs that address unequal access to broadband access across the country, through a post on his Truth Social website:

I have spoken with my wonderful Secretary of Commerce, Howard Lutnick, and we agree that the Biden/Harris so-called “Digital Equity Act” is totally UNCONSTITUTIONAL. No more woke handouts based on race! The Digital Equity Program is a RACIST and ILLEGAL $2.5 BILLION DOLLAR giveaway. I am ending this IMMEDIATELY, and saving Taxpayers BILLIONS OF DOLLARS!

While it may no longer seem possible for Trump’s proclamations to surprise, this one still managed to shock experts in telecommunications, who say that the gutting of Digital Equity Act programs will disadvantage millions of Americans. 

“It’s going to be huge,” Amy Huffman, policy director of the National Digital Inclusion Alliance, tells The Progressive. “People in every state and territory across the country will not have the robust [Internet] services that they would have otherwise.”

The Digital Equity Act, which was enacted by Congress in 2021 as part of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, was originally intended to combat this very problem. The law provided $2.75 billion to establish grant programs to help close gaps in digital equity and broadband capacity, with a goal to “ensure that all people and communities have the skills, technology, and capacity needed to reap the full benefits of our digital economy.” Nevada, for example, was expected to receive $9.2 million in 2024 to increase access to devices and technical support and to provide training in digital skills. But on May 9, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) sent termination of funding letters to recipients of the grants authorized under the law.

Gigi Sohn, executive director of the American Association for Public Broadband, says that Trump’s reversal of the Digital Equity Act will result in more Americans being unable to access the Internet due to lack of resources or skills. “We will continue to have a massive digital divide in this country,” Sohn tells The Progressive. “There are millions of people in this country who do not know how to turn on a computer, that don’t know how to use a search engine, that don’t know how to use a web-browser.”

Jessica Rosenworcel, the former chair of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) under President Joe Biden, estimated in 2024 that “nearly twenty-four million Americans are not connected to the Internet, including 28 percent of Americans living in rural areas and more than 23 percent of people on tribal lands.” The lack of comprehensive access, she said, “means millions of people still do not have the broadband they need to fully participate in modern life.” What’s more, many of those who will be negatively impacted from the potential loss of funding are Trump’s own supporters, who are highly concentrated in rural areas where broadband connectivity is still prevalent.

“In the world today, where everything is online, literally everything—accessing social services, accessing your doctor, accessing your kids’ school records, communicating with their teachers, you name it—anyone left offline means they are not adding to the local economy in the same way, they’re suffering, and they are losing out,” Huffman says. 

Since its founding about ten years ago, she says, the National Digital Inclusion Alliance has developed more than 2,000 affiliate chapters throughout the nation and its territories and more than forty partnerships with tribal entities, ranging from “small community groups all the way up to state governments.” 

Any attack on programs funded under the Digital Equity Act will also result in the loss of jobs including those of people Sohn calls “first-line sufferers” who teach others how to get online, often through non-governmental organizations or local offices of the nonprofit fundraising organization United Way. “We call them ‘digital inclusion’ organizations or ‘digital equity’ organizations,” she says. “There are thousands of people across the country whose job it is to get people online.”

Sascha Meinrath, Palmer Chair in Telecommunications at Penn State University,  notes that the Digital Equity Act—made up of the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program and the Digital Equity Program—is actually the third national effort to address digital inequity.  

The first effort, the Technology & Opportunities Program, was put forward in the 1990s. “It helped establish technology centers across the country,” Meinrath recalls. “The goal was to teach digital literacy in the early Internet era, almost proactively.” Thousands of community technology centers were created. But then the funding dried up, he says, and the centers shut down.

A second major effort, launched in 2009, was the Broadband Technology Opportunities Program, which Meinrath says sought to “invest in infrastructure and focus on connectivity and digital justice.” It was a time-limited stimulus program whose funding expired after several years.

“We now have an administration that is reconstituting the same failures of yesteryear,” he says, “but not for lack of funding, not for things petering out. But actively precipitating this digital injustice apocalypse.”

Meinrath finds Trump’s approach especially “irrational” given that, in his opinion, “the President who brings connectivity to rural America will be a hero.” 

“All Trump had to do is not do anything,” he says. “BEAD would have brought him huge positive kudos from all different constituencies, and he chose—for whatever reason—to screw up the win.”

Article available here.