Before I got on the line with Tony Rom from the Washington Post, I looked up my cell phone bill.

I went to the AT&T website, downloaded the PDF, and went through it, line by line.

And underneath the monthly charge and the various taxes, there was this one line with a small

fee for $1.85.

That is an amount of money that you are paying that helps subsidize this very big historic

program that the U.S. has had in place for many years now to help people who can't get online

and afford phone service in the way that you and I and perhaps some of your listeners can.

That program, the Universal Service Fund, pays for a bunch of things, including rural

health care technology and internet access for some schools, and a special program called Lifeline.

Lifeline is a digital safety net that is supposed to help low-income Americans get phone and internet service.

What Lifeline does, essentially, is it gives a monthly stipend to people. It's $9.25 or so.

And that stipend will subsidize their phone connectivity. There's just one problem. And it's that

lifeline plans kind of suck.

The telecom companies market specific plans for lifeline customers,

but the speed and data limits are paltry.

Plus, the program itself is riddled with problems.

Many of the people who are eligible aren't even able to sign up,

leaving Americans who desperately need to connect simply unable to do it.

And so it has really become this big question in this very digital age, especially during this pandemic.

Are the programs that we have in place to really help people afford access to the Internet and communicate with each other at a time when they can't meet in person. Are they doing what they need to be doing? Are they sufficient? And

increasingly, the answer appears to be no. Today on the show, how a program meant to connect

low-income Americans with phone and internet service has instead kept them stuck as second-class

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