Welcome to the Tech Policy Podcast, your source for policy rants and raves and former employees joining the show from Tech Freedom, your Washington, D.C. advocate for the freedom to tinker and innovate.

I'm Evan Swartzchstraver, your host on today's show, a lifeline for telephone service, a lifeline for cellular service,

and now a lifeline for broadband service. Currently, U.S. taxpayers subsidize landlord and

wireless telephone service for low-income users who meet certain criteria. You may have heard

this program referred to derisively by skeptics as the Obama phone program, but it certainly

predates President Obama. Is this an effective way of getting people connected to communication

services should this program be expanded to cover broadband? Joining me to discuss this is Will

Reinhart, Director of Technology and Innovation Policy at American Action Forum,

a Policy and Research Institute. Will, thank you for joining us.

Thanks for having me, Evan. And I look forward to today's conversation.

Well, Will, you used to work at Tech Freedom and then you left. Was it for more money and a better

title, or did you just get fed up with Barron?

I'm going to just, I'm going to hold back on that question. I'm not going to say one way or the

other. I think that's all the answer that our listeners need on that one. But let's get into the issue.

So what is the Lifeline program, Will, and how did it come about?

Yeah, so the Lifeline program is a program that helps to subsidize communication needs for

low-income families. And it's actually been around for a while. It started in the 1980s

under the Reagan administration. And the idea was to have some sort of program that provided lifeline connection

for individuals that needed a connection to communication services.

So it really, it's existed for quite some time.

And I don't really know that we have a very good idea of

why it's existed for such a good time, for such the long time that it has.

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