By now, everybody has written about the pending end of the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP). This is the federal program that provides a $30 monthly discount for broadband for low-income households and up to a $75 discount in tribal areas. The fund is available to homes with a household income under 200% of the federal poverty level or homes that participate in various federal low-income subsidy programs.

The ACP program was funded by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and was seeded with $14.2 billion, which was part of the $65 billion allocated to broadband. However, the original funding is running dry, and the FCC forecasts that the last month of fund disbursement will be April unless Congress acts to refill the funding. The FCC has already notified ISPs that they can’t add any new participants after February 7. For much of last year, the fund was growing by over 500,000 participants per month.

Just about everybody I know is betting against a miracle from Congress. The White House asked Congress to fund the ACP plan for a year for over $6 billion, and that seems like a big ask for a Congress that was the least productive in over a hundred years.

But even if the ACP gets funded somehow, either now or later this year, how sustainable is ACP if Congress has to act every year to renew it? Congress seems to be constantly at loggerheads over every low-income subsidy programs, and it seems like ACP would be a target for some legislators to kill every year.

There are members of Congress questioning if the funding is being well spent. For example, I’ve heard the stories of some big ISPs that had a low-income program for $9.99 per month that jacked up the fees to $30 when ACP could pay the bill.

Another issue to consider is that over 54% of the ACP funding is going to subsidize cell phones and not home broadband. There are many good arguments to be made that a subsidy is needed to provide cell phones to the homeless. But cell phones are not a good substitute for home broadband, particularly for a home with students. Unfortunately, most of the rumors of ACP fraud also concern unscrupulous cellular companies.

There have been calls for moving the ACP under the FCC’s Universal Service Fund. That would be a way to make the plan sustainable and remove it from the annual Congressional budget battles. But $6 billion a year would be a heavy push for the USF. There has been a lot of talk about changing the method of funding USF since the current funding that is based on telecom revenues is shrinking each year. It does seem possible that a reduced fund of a few billion per year could be rolled into the USF, particularly if ACP replaces the FCC’s Lifeline Fund.

There is no predicting Congress, and this bill could come up for a floor vote in time to save the fund for 2024. My guess is that even if ACP is funded, it will be at lower levels. It’s likely that legislators would reduce the income qualification to something lower than 200% of the poverty level and eliminate or lower the eligibility for cell phones. But I think it’s more likely that a Congress that can’t seem to pass a budget will not do anything with ACP before the fund runs dry. And once that happens, it will get easier and easier over time for Congress to ignore it.