Trump FCC Begins Dismantling Agency Civil Rights Reforms

FCC building

After decades of redlining and broadband “digital discrimination” by the nation’s biggest telecom monopolies, the FCC finally began taking aim at the problem in 2023. Now the entirety of those efforts are poised to be dismantled, courtesy of the Trump administration’s broad, controversial frontal assault on discrimination reforms and civil rights.

The 2021 infrastructure bill set aside $42.5 billion to expand broadband into all unserved parts of the United States.

But it also tasked the FCC with crafting new rules taking aim at “digital discrimination.” On November 15th of 2023 the agency obliged, passing rules banning ISPs from broadband discrimination based on income, race, or religion.

Civil rights and digital equity activists were split on the potential impact of the rules, but they did agree on one thing: it was historic for federal policymakers to finally admit that telecom monopoly deployments had unfairly excluded many low income and minority neighborhoods from affordable, next-generation broadband access.

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FCC Chair Brendan Carr looks into camera with the FCC seal and flag behind him

Trump’s incoming FCC boss Brendan Carr issued a statement claiming that the administration is eliminating discrimination reforms to purportedly stop…"discrimination." The move is primarily to the benefit of telecom monopolies accused of discrimination, which filed a federal lawsuit to prevent the rules last year via the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

“Promoting invidious forms of discrimination runs contrary to the Communications Act and deprives Americans of their rights to fair and equal treatment under the law,” the Trump FCC said in a statement. “It also represents a wasteful expenditure of taxpayer resources.”

The FCC's announcement came shortly after President Trump's Executive Order titled "Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing," which takes aim at former President Biden's Executive Order 13985 directing federal agencies to create DEI programs.

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White House Cloudy Sky

The efforts are part of a much broader Trump administration attempt to undermine civil rights reforms and enforcement, including the complete halt of all current and future civil rights litigation at the Department Of Justice.  

But telecom experts say the FCC’s civil rights reforms targeted by the Trump administration were neither radical nor wasteful. Several didn’t even have anything to do with “DEI” programs, a term that has become a rhetorically broad bogeyman for right wing politicians to demonize civil rights protections and undermine diversity efforts.

The FCC's Equity Action Plan, which was pulled offline by the Trump administration, featured government programs designed to help bridge the digital divide, including the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) and the Emergency Connectivity Program. While Carr’s announcement calls this a “DEI” program, it had little to do with past DEI proposals.

"What Carr calls the 'DEI Equity Action Plan' is actually just the 'Equity Action Plan' and has no connection to the Biden DEIA Executive Order, or to any staff/operations issues," Bill Callahan, the director of Connect Your Community, told CNET.

Inefficient Waste Or Coddling Monopoly Power?

For years, academics, journalists, and third-party consumer rights organizations have highlighted that major telecom giants routinely discriminated against minority and marginalized neighborhoods when deploying next-generation broadband access.

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AT&T skyscraper

Organizations like the National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA) have released numerous studies showing how companies like AT&T often refused to deploy next-generation broadband access to lower-income and minority communities, despite being heavily subsidized by the taxpayer. This digital redlining was particularly pronounced in cities like Detroit and Cleveland.

While private companies are obligated to making financially sound decisions to the benefit of their shareholders, they have also received untold billions in state and federal taxpayer subsidies, regulatory favors, merger approvals, tax breaks, and other benefits under the belief they would uniformly deliver broadband access to the entirety of America.

In addition to a refusal to upgrade or repair minority communities, reporting by The Markup found that many large providers charge poor, minority neighborhoods significantly more money for slower broadband access than their more affluent, less diverse counterparts.

Discrimination has long been present in the construction of U.S. highways and the equitable delivery of reliable and affordable electricity. The deployment of next-generation fiber often runs parallel with both, shaped by decisions made decades or generations earlier.

The U.S. broadband market is broadly uncompetitive due to regional monopolies and duopolies that work tirelessly to undermine both competition and oversight. This results in high prices, spotty access, slow speeds, and substandard customer service, all of which tend to disproportionately impact low income, minority, and marginalized communities.

The FCC’s digital discrimination efforts were an attempt to improve efficiency, by shoring up mapping efforts to ensure that taxpayer resources were being used to deliver affordable, next-generation broadband to as many people as uniformly as possible.

Wishing A Law Away

While the Trump administration may be keen to dismantle years of popular civil rights reforms under the pretense of eliminating “wasteful DEI initiatives,” their problem is there’s still an underlying law (the Infrastructure Investment And Jobs Act) requiring that the FCC take action on the very real problem of widespread digital discrimination.

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A sign that shows a tic tac toe board with an extra o outside the box giving the rule breaker the "win." Next to game squares it reads: "Break The Rules" and "Who Knows Where it Will Lead?"

Section 60506 of the infrastructure bill specifically tasked the FCC with crafting policies that prevent broadband discrimination on the basis of "race, ethnicity, color, religion, national origin, and income level.”

“Neither the FCC nor the Administration can unilaterally reverse that mandate,” says Gigi Sohn, a former FCC staffer and executive director of the American Association for Public Broadband (AAPB).

“A number of members of Congress are trying to use the Congressional Review Act to repeal the FCC’s rules, but again, even a successful CRA can’t repeal the law,” she Sohn added.

The longstanding Telecom Act is similarly peppered with language mandating the FCC work toward service equity, notes telecom policy analyst Blair Levin.

“The word diversity appears 17 times in the Act,” he notes. “Carr can interpret the Congressional direction to be meaningless but he cannot undo what Congress has done.”

The actual FCC digital discrimination rules are currently being challenged by the broadband industry in the Eighth Circuit. In the interim, Carr’s solution appears to be to simply claim that the very real problem of widespread digital discrimination has been magically solved, justifying the elimination of the FCC discrimination taskforce.

“As Chairman of the FCC, I have concluded that the work of the FCC’s Communications Equity and Diversity Council is complete,” Carr said in a statement. “This Advisory Group will therefore terminate pursuant to Section 10 of its Charter.”

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An older woman wearing a red suit jacket looks distressingly at her laptop, motioning with her hand toward the screen

While Carr’s announcement tries to frame the agency’s civil rights reforms as exclusively the byproduct of the previous administration, some of the agency’s diversity efforts, like the FCC’s Communications Equity And Diversity Council (whose website Carr had pulled offline), were created back in 2003 by former Republican FCC boss Michael Powell.

“At first glance, what he’s put out doesn’t have much to do with the digital discrimination rules, which are being challenged in the Eighth Circuit, other than the elimination of the Digital Discrimination Task Force,” Sohn said. “But clearly, the elimination of the Task Force is just the first shoe to drop in the new Commission’s efforts to undermine the mandate of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law that mandates that the FCC prohibit digital discrimination.”

The broadband industry’s challenge of digital discrimination rules is occurring as telecom monopolies successfully leverage the more monopoly-friendly Supreme Court to dismantle numerous consumer protections and programs, ranging from net neutrality protections to FCC programs like E-Rate designed to bring affordable broadband to low-income Americans.

While $42.5 billion in BEAD (Broadband Equity and Access) broadband grants were poised to head to the states, the Trump administration’s funding freeze has injected uncertainty into the program.

There’s also widespread concern that should BEAD proceed, Republicans will redirect money away from community broadband and toward party-loyalists like Elon Musk.

Whether the Trump FCC’s assault on civil rights reforms and consumer protection standards reforms can be reversed remains an open question, says Sohn and Levin.

“I think it’s hard to figure out next steps until we see what the 8th circuit will do,” Sohn says. “Even if the 8th circuit rules against the FCC, the FCC still has to have rules, albeit toothless ones. Needless to say, if the 8th Circuit upholds the rules, I fully expect the FCC, when it has a full complement of Commissioners, will weaken the rules anyway.”

As the federal government abdicates its legal responsibility on issues like consumer protection, equity, and healthy market competition, the responsibility for accountability and reform increasingly shifts to the state and local level as the locus of action and community-driven change.

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Inline image of FCC Chair Brendan Carr screenshot from American Enterprise Institute event

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