For no less than 25 years now, Techdirt has been writing about how the tax preparation industry, especially Intuit, has spent gobs of money bribing lobbying government to keep relatively low-earners from simple methods for filing their tax returns. The series of posts you can find in that link, particularly those in the last 5-10 years, will give you an idea of just how shady and shitty these companies have been to the public.
The short version goes something like this: the IRS partnered with large private tax prep companies to provide free online tax prep software for people making less than a certain dollar amount in exchange for the government not creating its own system for doing so. That’s it. The IRS didn’t pay these companies for their services. They just promised not to compete with them.
Now, why would these companies enter into such an arrangement? Is it because they wanted to help out lower income folks by offering free services? No, silly rabbit, they wanted to trick the public into paying for what they agreed to provide for free! And that’s exactly what companies like Intuit did, notoriously hiding its free services in every way it could and pushing qualified free-to-file applicants instead into paid tax prep services. The end result was fines from the FTC, Intuit attempting to hide refunds for the services it tricked the public into buying, and the discovery that it was tricking American veterans in the same manner, all the tune of $1 billion in income for Intuit alone.
Partially as a result of all of that above bullshit trickery, the government altered its deal with the tax prep industry and began offering its own Direct File program. For simple filers, the IRS piloted Direct File in 12 states in 2024, prepopulating a return for those that enroll, all based on information that the IRS already has, and asking participants to review it and either agree or dispute the information. Most overwhelmingly agree and the program was reviewed as “excellent or above average” by north of 90% of participants, which is of course why Trump and Elon Musk, back when they were besties, decided to fold the part of the government working on the program.
President Donald Trump’s massive spending and policy bill includes funding to research and “replace any direct e-file programs run by the Internal Revenue Service.” Already, the program is “gone,” Long said at a tax professional summit on July 28, Bloomberg Law reports.
“You’ve heard of Direct File, that’s gone,” Long said. “Big beautiful Billy wiped that out. I don’t care about Direct File. I care about direct audit.”
“Commissioner Billy Long is committed to modernizing the IRS and providing a taxpayer experience that meets today’s expectations, which includes giving taxpayers transparency into the status of their tax returns and audits,” an IRS spokesperson told CNBC Make It in an emailed statement.
That modernization effort reportedly is to rewind the clock several years and put us right back to where we were: a partnership between the IRS and the tax prep industry to offer free file programs. Modernization apparently means doing the thing we used to do that didn’t work.
The IRS has another free filing program where the agency partners with third-party tax preparation software companies to provide services to taxpayers, although there are varying eligibility requirements, including adjusted gross income and state of residence. You can use the IRS’ questionnaire tool to find an applicable partner.
There is literally no reason for any of this. Complaints from the GOP about how the program costs too much are obviously silly. The IRS has this information and the program should largely reduce the need for IRS audits and the like, since filers using it are using the IRS’ information. Complaints about conflicts of interest are also dumb, as the IRS is already the enforcer of taxation and participants have the option to dispute the information the IRS has. None of this makes sense…
…until you view it as a gift to the tax industry that has been lobbying against this program for decades before its creation. That’s all this is, a gift to the companies that lobbied for a favor.
And while Intuit exited the Free File program years ago, I’d be willing to bet my next tax return that they jump right back in now that they know the grift is back on.
We’re taking a little break from our regular weekly news roundups this month, but we’ve got a couple special episodes lined up in the mean time, starting with a conversation all about the past and future of Ctrl-Alt-Speech. This week, Mike and Ben talk about how the podcast got started, how we create the episodes, our philosophy about sponsorship, and what we need to make Ctrl-Alt-Speech sustainable in the long run. We hope you enjoy it!
One afternoon in mid-September, a group of middle school girls in rural East Tennessee decided to film a TikTok video while waiting to begin cheerleading practice.
In the 45-second video posted later that day, one girl enters the classroom holding a cellphone. “Put your hands up,” she says, while a classmate flickers the lights on and off. As the camera pans across the classroom, several girls dramatically fall back on a desk or the floor and lie motionless, pretending they were killed.
When another student enters and surveys the bodies on the ground in poorly feigned shock, few manage to suppress their giggles. Throughout the video, which ProPublica obtained, a line of text reads: “To be continued……”
Penny Jackson’s 11-year-old granddaughter was one of the South Greene Middle School cheerleaders who played dead. She said the co-captains told her what to do and she did it, unaware of how it would be used. The next day, she was horrified when the police came to school to question her and her teammates.
By the end of the day, the Greene County Sheriff’s Department charged her and 15 other middle school cheerleaders with disorderly conduct for making and posting the video. Standing outside the school’s brick facade, Lt. Teddy Lawing said in a press conference that the girls had to be “held accountable through the court system” to show that “this type of activity is not warranted.” The sheriff’s office did not respond to ProPublica’s questions about the incident.
Widespread fear of school shootings is colliding with algorithms that accelerate the spread of the most outrageous messages to cause chaos across the country. Social videos, memes and retweets are becoming fodder for criminal charges in an era of heightened responses to student threats. Authorities say harsh punishment is crucial to deter students from making threatening posts that multiply rapidly and obscure their original source.
In many cases, especially in Tennessee, police are charging students for jokes and misinterpretations, drawing criticism from families and school violence prevention experts who believe a measured approach is more appropriate. Students are learning the hard way that they can’t control where their social media messages travel. In central Tennessee last fall, a 16-year-old privately shared a video he created using artificial intelligence, and a friend forwarded it to others on Snapchat. The 16-year-old was expelled and charged with threatening mass violence, even though his school acknowledged the video was intended as a private joke.
Other students have been charged with felonies for resharing posts they didn’t create. As ProPublica wrote in May, a 12-year-old in Nashville was arrested and expelled this year for sharing a screenshot of threatening texts on Instagram. He told school officials he was attempting to warn others and wanted to “feel heroic.”
In Greene County, the cheerleaders’ video sent waves through the small rural community, especially since it was posted several days after the fatal Apalachee High School shooting one state away. The Georgia incident had spawned thousands of false threats looping through social media feeds across the country. Lawing told ProPublica and WPLN at the time that his officers had fielded about a dozen social media threats within a week and struggled to investigate them. “We couldn’t really track back to any particular person,” he said.
But the cheerleaders’ video, with their faces clearly visible, was easy to trace.
Jackson understands that the video was in “very poor taste,” but she believes the police overreacted and traumatized her granddaughter in the process. “I think they blew it completely out of the water,” she said. “To me, it wasn’t serious enough to do that, to go to court.”
That perspective is shared by Makenzie Perkins, the threat assessment supervisor of Collierville Schools, outside of Memphis. She is helping her school district chart a different path in managing alleged social media threats. Perkins has sought specific training on how to sort out credible threats online from thoughtless reposts, allowing her to focus on students who pose real danger instead of punishing everyone.
The charges in Greene County, she said, did not serve a real purpose and indicate a lack of understanding about how to handle these incidents. “You’re never going to suspend, expel or charge your way out of targeted mass violence,” she said. “Did those charges make that school safer? No.”
When 16-year-old D.C. saw an advertisement for an AI video app last October, he eagerly downloaded it and began roasting his friends. In one video he created, his friend stood in the Lincoln County High School cafeteria, his mouth and eyes moving unnaturally as he threatened to shoot up the school and bring a bomb in his backpack. (We are using D.C.’s initials and his dad’s middle name to protect their privacy, because D.C. is a minor.)
D.C. sent it to a private Snapchat group of about 10 friends, hoping they would find it hilarious. After all, they had all teased this friend about his dark clothes and quiet nature. But the friend did not think it was funny. That evening, D.C. showed the video to his dad, Alan, who immediately made him delete it as well as the app. “I explained how it could be misinterpreted, how inappropriate it was in today’s climate,” Alan recalled to ProPublica.
It was too late. One student in the chat had already copied D.C.’s video and sent it to other students on Snapchat, where it began to spread, severed from its initial context.
That evening, a parent reported the video to school officials, who called in local police to do an investigation. D.C. begged his dad to take him to the police station that night, worried the friend in the video would get in trouble — but Alan thought it could wait until morning.
The next day, D.C. rushed to school administrators to explain and apologize. According to Alan, administrators told D.C. they “understood it was a dumb mistake,” uncharacteristic for the straight-A student with no history of disciplinary issues. In a press release, Lincoln County High School said administrators were “made aware of a prank threat that was intended as a joke between friends.”
But later that day, D.C. was expelled from school for a year and charged with a felony for making a threat of mass violence. As an explanation, the sheriff’s deputy wrote in the affidavit, “Above student did create and distribute a video on social media threatening to shoot the school and bring a bomb.”
During a subsequent hearing where D.C. appealed his school expulsion, Lincoln County Schools administrators described their initial panic when seeing the video. Alan shared an audio recording of the hearing with ProPublica. Officials didn’t know that the video was generated by AI until the school counselor saw a small logo in the corner. “Everybody was on pins and needles,” the counselor said at the hearing. “What are we going to do to protect the kids or keep everybody calm the next day if it gets out?” The school district declined to respond to ProPublica’s questions about how officials handled the incident, even though Alan signed a privacy waiver giving them permission to do so.
Alan watched D.C. wither after his expulsion: His girlfriend broke up with him, and some of his friends began to avoid him. D.C. lay awake at night looking through text messages he sent years ago, terrified someone decades later would find something that could ruin his life. “If they are punishing him for creating the image, when does his liability expire?” Alan wondered. “If it’s shared again a year from now, will he be expelled again?”
Alan, a teacher in the school district, coped by voraciously reading court cases and news articles that could shed light on what was happening to his son. He stumbled on a case hundreds of miles north in Pennsylvania, the facts of which were eerily similar to D.C.’s.
In April 2018, two kids, J.S. and his friend, messaged back and forth mocking another student by suggesting he looked like a school shooter. (The court record uses J.S. instead of his full name to protect the student’s anonymity.) J.S. created two memes and sent them to his friend in a private Snapchat conversation. His friend shared the memes publicly on Snapchat, where they were seen by 20 to 40 other students. School administrators permanently expelled J.S., so he and his parents sued the school.
In 2021, after a series of appeals, Pennsylvania’s highest court ruled in J.S.’s favor. While the memes were “mean-spirited, sophomoric, inartful, misguided, and crude,” the state Supreme Court justices wrote in their opinion, they were “plainly not intended to threaten Student One, Student Two, or any other person.”
The justices also shared their sympathy with the challenges schools faced in providing a “safe and quality educational experience” in the modern age. “We recognize that this charge is compounded by technological developments such as social media, which transcend the geographic boundaries of the school. It is a thankless task for which we are all indebted.”
After multiple disciplinary appeals, D.C.’s school upheld the decision to keep him out of school for a year. His parents found a private school that agreed to let him enroll, and he slowly emerged from his depression to continue his straight-A streak there. His charge in court was dismissed in December after he wrote a 500-word essay for the judge on the dangers of social media, according to Alan.
Thinking back on the video months later, D.C. explained that jokes about school violence are common among his classmates. “We try to make fun of it so that it doesn’t seem as serious or like it could really happen,” he said. “It’s just so widespread that we’re all desensitized to it.”
He wonders if letting him back to school would have been more effective in deterring future hoax threats. “I could have gone back to school and said, ‘You know, we can’t make jokes like that because you can get in big trouble for it,’” he said. “I just disappeared for everyone at that school.”
When a school district came across an alarming post on Snapchat in 2023, officials reached out to Safer Schools Together, an organization that helps educators handle school threats. In the post, a pistol flanked by two assault rifles lay on a rumpled white bedsheet. The text overlaid on the photo read, “I’m shooting up central I’m tired of getting picked on everyone is dying tomorrow.”
Steven MacDonald, training manager and development director for Safer Schools Together, recounted this story in a virtual tutorial posted last year on using online tools to trace and manage social media threats. He asked the school officials watching his tutorial what they would do next. “How do we figure out if this is really our student’s bedroom?”
According to MacDonald, it took his organization’s staff only a minute to put the text in quotation marks and run it through Google. A single local news article popped up showing that two kids had been arrested for sharing this exact Snapchat post in Columbia, Tennessee — far from the original district.
“We were able to reach out and respond and say, ‘You know what, this is not targeting your district,’” MacDonald said. Administrators were reassured there was a low likelihood of immediate violence, and they could focus on finding out who was recirculating the old threat and why.
In the training video, MacDonald reviewed skills that, until recently, have been more relevant to police investigators than school principals: How to reverse image search photos of guns to determine whether a post contains a stock image. How to use Snapchat to find contact names for unknown phone numbers. How to analyze the language in the social media posts of a high-risk student.
“We know that why you’re here is because of the increase and the sheer volume of these threats that you may have seen circulated, the non-credible threats that might have even ended up in your districts,” he said. Between last April and this April, Safer Schools Together identified drastic increases in “threat related behavior” and graphic or derogatory social media posts.
Back in the Memphis suburbs, Perkins and other Collierville Schools administrators have attended multiple digital threat assessment training sessions hosted by Safer Schools Together. “I’ve had to learn a lot more apps and social media than I ever thought,” Perkins said.
The knowledge, she said, came in handy during one recent incident in her district. Local police called the district to report that a student had called 911 and reported an Instagram threat targeting a particular school. They sent Perkins a photo of the Instagram profile and username. She began using open source websites to scour the internet for other appearances of the picture and username. She also used a website that allows people to view Instagram stories without alerting the user to gather more information.
With the help of police, Perkins and her team identified that the post was created by someone at the same IP address as the student who had reported the threat. The girl, who was in elementary school, confessed to police that she had done it.
The next day, Perkins and her team interviewed the student, her parents and teachers to understand her motive and goal. “It ended up that there had been some recent viral social media threats going around,” Perkins said. “This individual recognized that it drew in a lot of attention.”
Instead of expelling the girl, school administrators worked with her parents to develop a plan to manage her behavior. They came up with ideas for the girl to receive positive attention while stressing to her family that she had exhibited “extreme behavior” that signaled a need for intensive help. By the end of the day, they had tamped down concerns about immediate violence and created a plan of action.
In many other districts, Perkins said, the girl might have been arrested and expelled for a year without any support — which does not help move students away from the path of violence. “A lot of districts across our state haven’t been trained,” she said. “They’re doing this without guidance.”
Watching the cheerleaders’ TikTok video, it would be easy to miss Allison Bolinger, then the 19-year-old assistant coach. The camera quickly flashes across her standing and smiling in the corner of the room watching the pretend-dead girls.
Bolinger said she and the head coach had been next door planning future rehearsals. Bolinger entered the room soon after the students began filming and “didn’t think anything of it.” Cheerleading practice went forward as usual that afternoon. The next day, she got a call from her dad: The cheerleaders were suspended from school, and Bolinger would have to answer questions from the police.
“I didn’t even know the TikTok was posted. I hadn’t seen it,” she said. “By the time I went to go look for it, it was already taken down.” Bolinger said she ended up losing her job as a result of the incident. She heard whispers around the small community that she was responsible for allowing them to create the video.
Bolinger said she didn’t realize the video was related to school shootings when she was in the room. She often wishes she had asked them at the time to explain the video they were making. “I have beat myself up about that so many times,” she said. “Then again, they’re also children. If they don’t make it here, they’ll probably make it at home.”
Jackson, the grandmother of the 11-year-old in the video, blames Bolinger for not stopping the middle schoolers and faults the police for overreacting. She said all the students, whether or not their families hired a lawyer, got the same punishment in court: three months of probation for a misdemeanor disorderly conduct charge, which could be extended if their grades dropped or they got in trouble again. Each family had to pay more than $100 in court costs, Jackson said, a significant amount for some.
Jackson’s granddaughter successfully completed probation, which also involved writing and submitting a letter of apology to the judge. She was too scared about getting in trouble again to continue on the cheerleading team for the rest of the school year.
Jackson thinks that officials’ outsize response to the video made everything worse. “They shouldn’t even have done nothing until they investigated it, instead of making them out to be terrorists and traumatizing these girls,” she said.
We’ve seen some pretty ridiculous attempts by government officials to intimidate judges over the years, but the Department of Justice’s new misconduct complaint against D.C. Chief Judge James Boasberg might take the cake for sheer absurdity. As Steve Vladeck breaks down in exhaustive detail, the DOJ is essentially arguing that a federal judge committed “misconduct” by privately expressing concerns to the Chief Justice that the Trump administration might not comply with court orders.
Spoiler alert: those concerns turned out to be entirely justified.
The complaint centers on comments Boasberg allegedly made at a March Judicial Conference meeting about “concerns that the Administration would disregard rulings of federal courts, leading to a constitutional crisis.” And these concerns were not even Boasberg’s own personal feelings. He was expressing what he was hearing from other judges on the court where he sits.
As Vladeck methodically demonstrates, DOJ’s theory collapses under scrutiny for four separate reasons.
First, the comments weren’t public. They were made at a private meeting of the Judicial Conference, and only became known because someone leaked a confidential memo summarizing the meeting. Vladeck nails why this matters:
Suffice it to say, DOJ never explains how a private comment at a private meeting that was made public only because a confidential memorandum memorializing the meeting was leaked could possibly violate Canon 3(A)(6). The best it can offer is the claim that, because the memorandum has become public, the comments they memorialize were illegitimate. But that’s true of anything a federal judge says in private. On that reading, a federal judge would violate Canon 3(A)(6) simply by discussing a pending case with a clerk or colleague—because that discussion might one day be made public.
Under DOJ’s logic, any private conversation a judge has could retroactively become “misconduct” if someone decides to leak it later. That’s not how judicial ethics work. That’s not how anything works.
Second, as noted above, Boasberg wasn’t pushing his own agenda—he was literally doing his job. As the D.C. Circuit’s district judge representative on the Judicial Conference, part of his role is to communicate his colleagues’ concerns to the Chief Justice. Vladeck notes that these appear to be “radical mischaracterizations of what actually happened,” and that Boasberg was simply “relaying concerns raised by his colleagues to the Chief Justice, almost certainly in response to a specific prompt that he do so.”
Third, and this is the kicker, Boasberg’s concerns were completely justified. Despite DOJ’s claim that “the Trump Administration has complied with every court order,” Vladeck points out that this is “quite obviously not true.”
Indeed, we all talked about how they were directly flouting judicial orders, and Boasberg himself wrote an opinion back in April (after he’d raised these concerns) finding probable cause that DOJ lawyers and government officials acted in “willful disregard” of a temporary restraining order when human trafficked Venezuelans to a Salvadoran gulag.
Let’s be clear about the timeline: a judge expressed valid private concerns that the government might not follow court orders, the government proceeded to violate court orders (including one from this very judge!), and now DOJ is claiming the judge committed misconduct for… being right?
And fourth, even if none of the above were true, there’s still no violation here. Boasberg didn’t say he was predisposed to rule against the government in specific cases. He didn’t prejudge any particular policies. He raised institutional concerns about governmental compliance with court orders—which is exactly the kind of thing members of the Judicial Conference should be discussing.
Vladeck identifies the real audiences for this charade. It’s not actually about disciplining Boasberg—the complaint is “laughably preposterous” and will almost certainly be dismissed. Instead, it’s about sending a message:
The first audience is other district judges—including those perhaps without the reputation and stature (and backbone) of Chief Judge Boasberg. Even frivolous judicial misconduct complaints come at a cost—especially when they’re filed not by private litigants, but by the U.S. Department of Justice. If the Chief Judge of the D.C. district court can come in for such treatment for doing nothing more than conveying his colleagues’ concerns to the Chief Justice at a meeting at which that’s his job, perhaps other judges will think twice the next time they want to publicly reprimand the government or otherwise say anything that could be construed in any way as reflecting comparable concerns about the behavior of the current Department of Justice.
This is straight-up judicial intimidation. File a bogus complaint against one prominent judge to cow the rest into silence. Remember that this is all happening against the backdrop of the Trump admin attacking a bunch of judges for daring to try to uphold the Constitution against a government determined to tear down the Constitution.
The second audience, according to Vladeck, is Trump supporters, who get fed misleading headlines about “biased judges” without the context showing how legally frivolous this complaint actually is. Indeed, Vladeck also calls out that this story “leaked” to MAGA mouthpiece, The Federalist, which clearly was given access to the confidential memo that an attendee had written up summarizing what was said that spurred this complaint… but did not publish it, suggesting that if we saw the full memo, in context, it would be clear how it was being misrepresented here:
Indeed, the fact that The Federalist appears to have obtained that confidential memo but has not published it seems to strongly suggest, among other things, that the memo is not only entirely benign, but that it may provide even further context for Boasberg’s remarks.
Also notable: The Federalist entirely avoided giving the (kinda important!) context that Boasberg was sharing the views he heard from other judges, rather than just expressing his own opinion.
Perhaps most galling is Attorney General Bondi’s tweet claiming Boasberg’s comments “have undermined the integrity of the judiciary, and we will not stand for that.”
The lack of self-awareness here quite something. What’s actually undermining judicial integrity is the Department of Justice filing baseless misconduct complaints against judges who dare to hold the government accountable when it violates court orders.
As Vladeck puts it:
In fact, the only thing undermining the integrity of the judiciary here is the Department of Justice filing a patently baseless and profoundly misleading misconduct complaint against a federal judge who did nothing more than diligently discharge his duties.
Federal judges aren’t supposed to be government cheerleaders. Part of their job is identifying systemic problems with how the legal system is functioning—including when the government isn’t complying with their orders. Encouraging judges to stay silent about such issues doesn’t strengthen judicial integrity; it eviscerates it.
The separation of powers isn’t supposed to be a one-way street where judges quietly rubber-stamp whatever the government wants to do. It’s supposed to involve actual checks and balances, which sometimes means judges pointing out when the other branches are acting lawlessly.
You know, that whole constitutional framework thing we’re supposed to have.
This complaint will almost certainly fail. But the damage is already done. Other judges are watching, and some might think twice before calling out government misbehavior in the future.
That’s not how a functioning democracy is supposed to work. But then again, intimidating judges into silence probably isn’t the behavior of an administration that’s particularly committed to democratic norms in the first place.
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First, the Trump administration gutted the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, probably because it was too concerned about protecting constitutional rights. Whoever still remained was “allowed” to do whatever Trump’s DOJ (now headed by yet another regrettable Trump pick, Pam Bondi) wanted it to do… like go to bat for the Second Amendment, which has never been seriously threatened by anyone anywhere since its inception.
Whoever didn’t get fired for not being all-MAGA, all the time decided it was time to call it a career. Anyone who forgot to lie to courts or failed to push abject bullshit past federal judges was shown the door. And with the Civil Rights division (or CRT in DOJ parlance) down to just the Trump loyalists, it would have made sense to do as little as possible with these extremely limited resources.
The Justice Department is soliciting staff within its Civil Rights Division to take reassignments to fill vacancies in areas related to education, employment and voting, with leaders citing the “deep need” created by significant vacancies.
The requests come as the division has shed hundreds of employees—or more than 60% of its workforce—since January and the Trump administration has assigned attorneys to tackle new priorities. The department is now scrambling to fill vacancies it has incentivized employees to leave through the extended paid leave program known as “deferred resignations,” early retirement and other offers.
Obviously, this has nothing to do with a suddenly renewed interest in investigating abusive law enforcement agencies or otherwise trying to restore and uphold a whole lot of severely bruised civil rights. No, this scramble for litigators is entirely propelled by the Trump administration’s undying interest in making America worse again.
This version of the DOJ CRT is missing nearly three-quarters of its legal team thanks to Trump. And somehow the DOJ thinks the priorities of the Trump administration will attract some litigators who have left as well as convince others doing less heinous things (maybe!) this shift in focus will be good for their careers, even if it won’t do much for their souls.
The head of CRT, Harmeet Dhillon, has a list of priorities that all sound pretty good in theory: education, employment, and voting. In practice, it’s an absolute horror show.
In May, for example, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche created the Civil Rights Fraud Initiative to investigate any recipient of federal funds that promotes diversity, equity and inclusion, allows antisemtism—which the administration has increasingly defined as college campuses that enable protests against the Israeli government—supports transgender women playing women’s sports or other perceived violations of administration policy.
[…]
Under its new mission statement, the voting section is now focused on ensuring accurate voter databases and eliminating fraud. Sen. Peter Welch, D-Vt., said in a report he issued last week on the changes taking place at CRT that the section has gone “from protecting voting rights to restricting voting access.” The employment section has recently shifted away from pursuing cases in which organizations allegedly engaged in race-based pay discrimination.
Yep, these positions are open to anyone willing to help the DOJ censor students, mistreat transgender kids, support voter suppression efforts, and let companies get away with paying people less just because they aren’t white.
There’s nothing involving civil rights happening here, at least not in a positive way. Instead, the DOJ is hoping there are still enough lawyers left in the building to assist Trump in ideological lawfare efforts that most voters — even many of his own — don’t support.
This is an entire administration consumed with a undying passion for punching down. No one here is seeking to elevate anyone but themselves. The only thing we might be able to enjoy — at least for the time being — is that they’ve fired so many people they don’t have enough people left to help them with their punching.
The Trump administration is once again warning states that they risk losing billions of dollars in historic infrastructure bill grants — if they attempt to make the taxpayer-subsidized broadband actually affordable.
That’s the updated guidance coming out of the Trump National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), which is tasked with coordinating the looming $42.5 billion Broadband Equity Access and Deployment (BEAD) grant made possible by the 2021 infrastructure bill.
We’ve already noted how Republicans (who voted against this program repeatedly, then whined about it taking too long) have introduced massive new delays by redirecting billions in BEAD dollars away from local fiber ISPs and toward Elon Musk’s congested, expensive satellite broadband service, Starlink.
But Republicans were also incensed by the fact that the original BEAD program, as crafted by Congress, included provisions trying to ensure that ISPs that take taxpayer money at least make a fleeting effort to offer one tier of service that’s affordable to low-income Americans.
“The Trump administration points to the latter language in its argument that ISPs alone must choose the price of the low-cost option. The new version of the BEAD FAQ says that states may not require specific rates for the low-cost service option (LCSO), even when required by state law.”
States that balk at eliminating affordability requirements, or the requirement that they slather Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk with billions of dollars, risk missing out on billions of dollars in historic broadband subsidies. The punishments also will likely curtail state leaders from openly calling out how corrupt and buffoonish this all is, lest they also want to risk losing funds.
As with most everything the Trump administration does, corruptly pandering to big telecom is pretty far from any sort of “populism,” and only ensures that U.S. broadband — even if you’ve paid for it via your tax dollars — remains equal parts inferior and expensive.
