For you and the party as you observe this process unfold . Guest is a crucial time in the history of the country so it is very important to actually have a unified or unifying convention so there is a nominee somebody who gets above the majority of votes people need to rally around that person. If it is a contested convention so nobody is going into the convention with a majority of delegates the moment you showed gerald ford calling Ronald Reagan down to the stage as to signal the unity of the party party is absolutely crucial. It can be a positive for the party to have democracy flourishing in public but you do have to unify things in the end. Host veteran of the and george w. Bush campaign, ben ginsburg former counsel for the Republican National committee, thank you for explaining all of this. Guest thank you. Here on cspan2 tonight the communicators is next with a look at the fccs Lifeline Program which provides nearly 12 million households access to phone service in the u. S. Host this week on the communicators a discussion of the federal government Lifeline Program which is administered by the federal communications commission. Federal communications commission. Joining us our two guests to discuss this, Amina Fazlullah is policy director and Daniel Daniel lyons is with American EnterpriseInstitutes Center for internet indications and technology. He is a visiting scholar there from boston college. Amina fazlullah what is this Lifeline Program and how to come about . Guest the Lifeline Program actually came about during the Reagan Administration in order to provide a subsidy to make sure that low income persons that have access to Voice Service, Telephone Service and this comes from the notion that having everyone on the network and having access to public safety, having access to each other in commerce is incredibly important and for low income persons making sure that they have Additional Support to do that is necessary so thats where the program began. Host and how many people participate in this program . Guest as of this past year about 13 million. Host and whats the cost . Guest so the cost of the program is for household. Host 9. 25. Guest thats right and so its a relatively minimal subsidy and the cost has gone down over the past few years in terms of the overall cost for the Lifeline Program and the total universal service. Host is it specifically for wire funds or is it wireless as well . Guest currently, during the Reagan Administration to telephone wired Service Began and then after the bush administration, they introduced wireless, so as it stands today there is wired and Wireless Voice available within the program. Host daniel lyons has it been successful in your view . Guest its not clear that what the success rate of lifeline is played as one of the problems with the program that exists now so lifeline was more or less a political compromise between the carriers and the fcc when the government broke up the at t monopoly. Part of the concern was while we would establish this amount to low income consumers the goal making sure that low income consumers can get access to Telephone Service. No one has really done a study to figure out whether the amount we are giving is actually going towards people who would otherwise not fall off the grid. So the gao issued just last year that criticized the fcc for this purpose so i think there is a bipartisan support for the idea that a low income households should have some service to make sure they are not falling off the grid to make sure they can manage the latest communication system. The concern is whether or lifeline is actually achieving that. When the gao asked its gao asked fcc for evidence that lifeline is successful the fcc pointed to a thirdparty report an academic report that suggested it might he as much as 80 of lifeline dollars of households that would have Telephone Service even without the subsidy. Host how is abundant . Guest is funded by the universal service charge, the monthly tax on your wireless bill or your landline phone bills. In the way they calculate is the fcc estimates how much is going to need per year and then divides it over interstate talk medications so its longdistance revenue largely. A percentage is charge of the carrier thats passed along to me and you the consumer. Host Amina Fazlullah hasnt been successful in your view . Yes go i think a prored has been successful and i agree that it would be better for the fcc to take steps to understand the population better and understand the impact of the program and not have to rely on thirdparty reports, but i do think the program is successful and id like to step back just for a moment to understand who we are talking about in terms of who the users are. So, the Lifeline Program is restricted to full who earn about 135 of the poverty line or lower so for a family of four in the contiguous 48 thats about 32,000 a year. If you live in a city like des moines, since San Francisco is not new york to cost about 53,000 a year for you to meet your average expenses for a family of four. So they are suffering. They are differently well below below they have well below what they need per year in terms of income and so there are times when they are going to make decisions like should i pay the phone bills or should i get food . Should i get food or should i get medicine . So folks do fall on and off. I think every everybody understands today low income or high income, the broadband and Cell Phone Services vitally important. And so people try to make that work because its a necessary tool for their lives. When you are looking at the numbers, its really really difficult to even conceive of how these families are going to be able to meet their needs and stay on highcost Subscriber Program like broadband or Telephone Service without the support. So i think that understanding the struggles that these families are facing, lifeline is done a great job of providing the support thats going to be there for them continuously. Host the fcc in their marketing will be talking about the Lifeline Program and to get more perspective on that lets bring in Brendan Sasso of the the National Journal into the conversation as well. Guest thanks peter. To provide context and latest updates the fcc is set to vote later this month on the changes to the Lifeline Program, the biggest change being there are going to include Broadband Internet service so people can use that 9dollar subsidy not just for cell phone or landline but for Internet Access either at home or data package for their cell phone. My question is whether you think the 9. 25 is enough. I know that most people, cost a lot more than that to get Home Broadband connection or a data plan for a family so is that enough to encourage people to adopt broadband otherwise . Guest i think its a good first step. I think that the fcc is going to be making a lot of changes to this program and moving in its elaborate fashion make sense. There are programs that are out currently that are not part of the dash that are available to lowincome families that are coming in around the 10dollar mark. There are a lot of other costs that are required to access the internet. They will have to have a device potentially training and support , and there are prorants out there to support lowincome families so they have access to all the pieces. 9. 25 is a good place to start but i think its yet to be seen whether or not that will be enough going forward. Guest were where the 9. 25 comes for is extending that out but i think the fcc is putting the cart before the horse because they havent done a real study to suggest these are the drivers that are keeping lowincome people from adopting Broadband Service and this is the amount we are going to need. We dont know if we need 9 a month for 10 Million People are 45 a month keen notably. We have to be sure where to play in the money effectively. The fcc simply hasnt done that level of analysis. We have a series of broadband trials that the fcc adopted in 22,000 ultimate 12 and the goal was to try to provide data but unfortunately they were not designed in a way that had measurable output results and the sample sizes on that being too small. One thing we did learn from those trials is that the higher the subsidy the more the uptake rate to suggest that in fact my dollars a month is probably too low and the broad ban prices are 50, 60, 70 a month. It wont be enough to incentivize people who use broadband. Guest one thing thats interesting about the proposal is would phase out support for mobile voice only. There are some people may be elderly especially who just dont want to get broadband at maybe they like Free Cell Phone Service right now. Is it a concern that those people wont be potentially supported and the program any more . Guest there is as of right now it looks like a phaseout and theres definitely concern, how this Consumer Population is going to shift from having a product that was focused on voice and now a product that they are used to using a product that might have some component of voice as well as a component of data or different device completely so for my feature phone to a smartphone. Its going to take a careful approach by the fcc to transition those folks. I think we all understand the benefits of making sure that everyone has access to broadband thats it i think its a difficult world for the fcc to play. They want to encourage the modernization of the program are they differently dont want anybody to be left behind because they are not quite ready for that step. Host in a sense is this a backdoor reform of the universal service fund . Guest is one step among many that the fcc has taken over the years to Transition Service from a telephonebased program to a broadbandbased program. There is Additional Support that the fcc provides for rural areas that they call the highcost fund to help cover carriers that provide service in places where there are not a lot of people in the fcc transition back into broadband as well. Part of the problem with taking the old telephone system and simply moving it to broadband as we replicate some of the errors and difficult as we had and what makes more sense is the fcc to rethink this from ground zero rather than have an evolutionary change of a lifeline or universal service. Starting at zero in designing a system today to provide broadband support, how would i do it . S. Go and how would you do it . Guest with regard to a lifeline in particular what makes sense some sort of system that is direct to the language that president obama used to disconnect all and i think it makes a lot of sense for the fcc to figure out first evolved what are the drivers of broadband adoption. Its not just the monthly fee that is a problem. You could have rock band on the computer for example. Thats problematic so a holistic approach would involve not not just a subsidy for Monthly Service but also some type of equipment subsidy for the computer eligible recipient also a digital outreach. We did a survey about why people who are not on broadband have chosen not to. We just dont think we need to be on the internet. There will be a group of people for example that are never going to adopt it but for those that simply dont appreciate everything you can get from broadband subscriptions, those are the sorts of things i would group together and funded in a different way as well. And he would fund at how . Rather than using a universal universal service Fund Mechanism which is problematic a map to until recently there wasnt a budget on the program and b is growing exponentially so the u. S. Charge was 3 in 1998 and now its at 18 which is close to that tax if they put on hotels for people coming from out of town. Rather than fund it that way what makes sense is a line item in the federal budget just like any other Subsidy Program something that is subject to congressional oversight that has a hard cap that forces the program to figure out how to use these most efficiently to get people on the grid and may be moved out of the fcc had Something Like hhs or another agency that has a better understanding of poverty issues. One of the critiques of the universal fund over the past 2020 years has been its focus more on the needs of carriers than the needs of consumers. Thats not a surprise given we carry such a large constituency. Host Amina Fazlullah hasnt worked in your view . The funding mechanism . Guest i think the uss program has worked for many years now. I think its at a crossroads where we are going to have to consider how we can choubey to that program as more consumers migrate from traditional Telephone Service and Voice Service to the traditional base of where the dollars come from and go to broadband and voice ip and migrate to other types of services. Thats going to be considered and i think that is sort of the next step for the fcc. So as you said we have seen each piece of the usf fund get upgraded and modernized so it began with high costs which turned into the tech america fun to be focused on broadband. They think that was the right step to take. I think the laws that are written around usf are flexible enough so they are actually taking the initiative to make that happen. We saw the upgrade of ee rates. I think thats a really exciting moment and we saw the president come out with connected to support the steps the fcc was taking. But they also pushed for steps from the department of education as well as the fcc so wasnt a one step process where we hope that ebay could do it all. We understand limitations and now we are looking at lifeline. Lifeline you know i think is very focused on cost subsidy for service. Its not going to be the program thats going to provide us with equipment or additional training and while these aspects are really important the fcc might not be the place to do all of those things in one setting and lifeline is definitely not the program thats going to be able to handle all the pieces as well i think what we have seen with the connect Call Initiative from the white house is acknowledgment. Its going to take many aspects of government working together to be able to actually close the Digital Divide and close these gaps. Host Brendan Sasso. Guest you mention potentially whether to expand broadband are whats contributing to the program. The goal is to encourage adoption by certain elements that is counterproductive in that you are increasing the cost of the to get broadband. If you could make with at least those issues and confuse the viewers that the attacks on the internet and that i would have that might be something the fcc would be a little gun shy about doing. Guest i mean i think our tradition reform is overdue. I know the fcc is argued looking into that and there is a report that is supposed to be released on the assessment of this particular issue. So i think everyone who works on universal service is aware that this is coming. I think of it will be tricky. Theres no doubt its going to be a big shift and, or its going to be big shift for what the program can do if it doesnt change much. So i think it will be a tricky issue for the fcc to tackle. Guest to add a little bit of meat to that skeleton the primary issue with the service on contribution mechanism right now is that the only base that the usf can be attached to is currently interstate and International Telephone charges. The problem is not only are people making a lot of longdistance calls, the tax is shrinking and at the same time lifeline and the high cost of funding these programs are growing and ending up with a larger fraction. One solution might be ultimately to increase the face base by saying we are going to at the tax and not just phone revenue but your monthly internet charge. Thats something that potentially is on the table now that the fcc has reclassified Internet Access as telecommunication but a politically difficult a because the fcc base some of the controversial move to reclassified internet has made a promise that we are not going to tax the internet and even a specific congressional statute out there that says that to preempt any type of attempt to attack Internet Access. If the fcc has to thread a needle to argue that universal Service Reform coming universal charges are not a tack said okay under the statute. And face the political consequences. Host why is this happening now . Guest it is happening now because more and more of our lives are migrating on line. I think the industry itself is looking at sun setting the traditional Telephone Network over the next five to 10 years and the programs that use to support