Another death blow to Puerto Rico: FCC plans to cut Lifeline phones as hurricane season draws near
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The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is planning to close the doors of opportunity, and perhaps even to survival for people in Puerto Rico, and others here on the mainland who depend upon the Lifeline phone program. Plans to make major cuts to LifelineAnother death blow to Puerto Rico: FCC plans to cut Lifeline phones as hurricane season draws near
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is planning to close the doors of opportunity, and perhaps even to survival for people in Puerto Rico, and others here on the mainland who depend upon the Lifeline phone program. Plans to make major cuts to Lifeline, at a time when the next hurricane season is only a few weeks away, are actually a matter of life or death for the 369,000 customers on the island: The Lifeline program, created in 1985 during the Reagan administration, is the only federal program that helps connect poor and marginalized communities to telecommunications services. Lifeline provides access to affordable broadband and voice for nearly 13 million Americans by providing a modest subsidy of $9.25 a month to help ease the high-cost of communications for individuals and families living on the margins, providing a means to participate in our digital society. Despite the positive role Lifeline played to assist victims of Hurricane Katrina, the Trump administration’s FCC has proposed changes that would sharply alter the purpose and scope of the program, further antagonizing hurricane victims who are still struggling to rebuild. Before the catastrophic 2017 hurricane season, over 500,000 island households relied on the Lifeline program to stay connected. After the storms, 95.6 percent of cell sites in Puerto Rico were out of service. Although the number has been reduced to 4.2 percent of cell sites, access to Lifeline is instrumental in helping Puerto Ricans recover and rebuild. The FCC’s proposals cruelly and inexplicably threaten to disconnect over 369,000 Lifeline customers in Puerto Rico alone. The FCC’s justification for these proposals relies on the pretext that the changes would stimulate investment in broadband networks; but there simply is no evidence that these changes would bring such a result. To the contrary, they would be counterproductive. What is abundantly clear is that the FCC proposals would not only result in unnecessary hardships to Puerto Ricans, Texans, and Floridians impacted by the 2017 hurricanes, but particularly harm low-income Americans across the United States. Read more