During the first year of Brendan Carr’s chairmanship, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has focused on bureaucratic processes but has not paid attention to consumer affordability of broadband service, says a recent analysis by the Benton Institute for Broadband and Society.
The analysis, written by Benton’s Kevin Taglang, takes issue with the Commission’s Annual Performance Report released earlier this month and reviews FCC activity during fiscal year 2025 (October 2024 to September 2025).
The report “measures process, not outcomes — rules deleted, proceedings launched and completed, applications processed — but offers no evidence that broadband deployment has actually accelerated, that prices have fallen, or that the digital divide has narrowed,” the Benton analysis concludes.
In its report, the FCC clearly states that its goal is “promoting good governance, increasing efficiency, and modernizing agency processes. In improving efficiencies at the FCC, we generated millions of dollars in savings by eliminating or modifying unnecessary contracts.”
Reading the two reports side-by-side is like reading two worldviews of what represents good governance in telecommunications regulation. While the current FCC seeks to save taxpayer dollars, improve Commission efficiency, and eliminate obsolete rules, Benton says the measure of success is growth of connectivity, especially among low-income Americans.
The Benton analysis is highly critical of the FCC report’s lack of policy statements on Universal Service, which it calls “the agency’s most effective tool for closing the digital divide.” However, as Benton itself explains, the ill-fated universal service Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) program has been anything but effective.
In 2020, the FCC opened an RDOF reverse auction with the goal of distributing $16 billion for broadband construction to the lowest bidders. Due to multiple factors, by the end of the auction the Commission had only awarded about $9 billion to winning bidders. In the years since then, many of those companies have failed to meet construction deadlines and defaulted on their RDOF awards.
“FCC data show that by 2025, $3.3 billion in RDOF awards were in default, and 1.9 million locations were no longer scheduled to receive service: more than one out of every three RDOF investments had failed,” according to the Benton analysis.
While Benton does not directly blame the FCC for the defaults, it criticizes the Performance Report for not offering solutions for the homes left unserved by the defaults. In fact, the report does not mention RDOF in any context.
In the years since RDOF’s collapse, Congress has allocated billions of dollars for the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program and other broadband construction programs administered by other federal agencies. RDOF is overshadowed and the FCC has been mostly out of the broadband funding business for more than five years. It may be unrealistic to expect new solutions, as the FCC explores new, post-BEAD Universal Service policies.
