According to Ars Technica, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr is pushing for a nationwide vote next month on new Lifeline eligibility rules, alleging that California’s program paid providers nearly $5 million over five years for over 116,000 deceased subscribers, with 81% of those claims in California. The Lifeline program spends nearly $1 billion annually, providing up to $9.25 monthly for phone and internet bills to nearly 9 million low-income households. Carr’s proposal, a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, would require full Social Security numbers, use a federal immigration verification system, and prevent states like California from using their own verification processes. California’s Public Utilities Commission fired back, calling the focus “misleading and political,” and attributing the payments to a natural “lag time” between a death and account closure, not fraud at enrollment. The only Democratic FCC commissioner, Anna Gomez, argues the plan uses “cruel and punitive” standards that will shut out eligible people.
Political theater or fraud fight?
Here’s the thing: this fight is about way more than just dead people getting $9.25 discounts. It’s a classic federal vs. state power struggle, wrapped in a politically charged election year package. Carr is framing this as a straightforward waste, fraud, and abuse issue, pointing to the Inspector General report that found payments continuing for an average of 4.4 months after death. But California’s retort, that this is just the “reality of administering a large public program,” also has merit. In any massive database system, there’s going to be lag. The real question is whether that lag is being exploited or if it’s just bureaucratic inertia.
And the numbers are worth a closer look. $5 million over five years in a $1-billion-a-year program is 0.1% of the total. Is that a scandal requiring a nationwide rules overhaul? Or is it a relatively minor administrative issue? Carr’s emphasis seems outsized, which is why Gomez calls it a “likely attempt to tip the scales against perceived political enemies.” When you target California specifically, a state already in a running battle with the FCC, it’s hard not to see the politics at play.
The real impact could be on the living
This is where the policy gets sticky. Carr’s argument is simple: stopping fraud lowers the Universal Service Fee on everyone’s phone bill. But Gomez’s warning is stark. She says the proposed rules, which mirror stricter Medicaid standards, will create huge barriers for the very people Lifeline is supposed to help: seniors, people with disabilities, and rural residents. We’re talking about requiring full SSNs and using the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) program. For vulnerable populations, that’s a huge hurdle.
Basically, the cure could be worse than the disease. If the new verification process is so complex that it delays benefits or causes eligible households to drop out entirely, you haven’t saved the program’s integrity—you’ve gutted its purpose. And let’s be honest, the benefit is already paltry. At $9.25 a month, it barely makes a dent in today’s connectivity costs, especially after the end of the more substantial Affordable Connectivity Program. So we’re fighting over scraps while potentially making it harder for needy families to get those scraps at all.
A battle of narratives and documents
The back-and-forth this week has been a masterclass in selective reading. Carr emphatically stated that tens of thousands were enrolled *after* they died. But the IG report itself is more nuanced, saying it could be as high as 39,362, but they can’t be sure for about 22,588 of those cases because the states don’t report the needed data. California’s CPUC and the Governor’s office seized on that, shouting “The facts!” to counter what they see as misinformation.
So who’s right? They both are, depending on which part of the report you highlight. The IG found a real problem. But California isn’t wrong that this is a systemic, nationwide data synchronization issue, not a uniquely Californian scandal. The FCC already revoked California’s “opt-out” status last November, so this new rulemaking feels like an extra punitive step. Carr’s promise to “hold bad actors accountable” and look at “all the remedies on the table” sounds a lot like a threat of financial penalties, which would just further drain resources.
What happens next?
The FCC votes on February 18 to issue the NPRM. Then there’s a public comment period, which will be a magnet for advocacy groups from all sides. Final rules are months away. In the meantime, the political sniping will continue. The underlying tension here is a philosophical one: is the goal of a safety net program to be perfectly efficient with zero fraud, even if that means excluding some eligible people? Or is it to cast a wide net to ensure everyone who needs help gets it, accepting that some waste will occur in the process?
I think we all know where each side stands. Carr is pushing for airtight, centralized, federal control. California and Commissioner Gomez are arguing for accessibility and state flexibility. In the world of essential infrastructure—whether it’s telecom networks or the industrial panel PCs that monitor and control them—reliability and access are key. The risk is that in the quest for a perfectly clean ledger, we disconnect the very people this “lifeline” was named for. And that seems like a much bigger failure than a lag in closing accounts for the deceased.
