Image credit: UCSD Jacobs School of Engineering – Katherine Connor (Published via CC 3.0 – Jacobs School of Engineering, UC San Diego)
In our hyper-online era, digital equity is crucial. Whether we’re talking access to health care, education, managing household finances, or participating in civic affairs and political discussions, having a fast and reliable internet connection is vital.
Yet new federal guidelines for a $42.5 billion initiative to extend broadband access to rural communities throughout the U.S. hamstring these very efforts.
In California’s case, the state’s stance on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), workforce skills development, and climate change, has put it in the crosshairs of the Trump administration’s new approach to allocating funding for the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program.
The new guidelines, announced June 6, provide easy opportunities to arbitrarily deprive California of billions of dollars during the next four years. Low-income minority households in rural parts of the state stand to be among those most affected.
More alarming still is that this blow comes after two years of visionary state planning to advance digital equity. Even before the new BEAD guidelines were announced, California was notified on May 9, 2025 that its Digital Equity Capacity Program was terminated, resulting in an immediate loss of $70 million and signaling that future funding might also be compromised.
“As the President determined and as Secretary Lutnick agreed, the Digital Equity Capacity Program, 47 U.S.C. § 1723, is unconstitutional and grants issued pursuant to it were created with, and administered using, impermissible and unconstitutional racial preferences,” according to a May 9 letter sent to the California Department of Technology, which oversees IT projects and planning for the state.
Stalled progress toward digital equity hurts both individual households and entire communities. Consequences of impaired broadband access include:
- For low-income households: formidable barriers to self-directed online learning for workforce skills development, as well as impeding health issue awareness and health care access
- For local communities: catastrophic decrease in American Community Survey and decennial census response that will keep communities from receiving their fair share of census-driven funding
Unfair allocation of federal funding could have a huge impact on progress toward digital equity. More than half of California’s current spending on broadband infrastructure ($4.9 billion out of $7.8 billion) was from federal sources, with $1.9 billion coming directly from BEAD.
The Federal Communication Commission’s latest map of broadband access shows that farmworkers and California Indian communities in northern California will be most adversely affected by the new regulations.
For example, although broadband access is available in the center of many towns, large swathes of the Eastern Coachella Valley where farmworkers live in trailers have no access. The same pattern can be seen throughout the state’s agricultural counties.
Further north, the Hoopa and Yurok tribal government announced ambitious broadband expansion plans to bring service to most of their residents in May, 2025. These plans are now threatened by potential shortfalls in California’s current digital equity budget.
Access to online learning opportunities, meanwhile, is particularly crucial in rural areas and the most effective instructional programs depend on broadband access.
According to Amanda Bergson-Shilcock of the National Skills Coalition, “Ninety-two percent of jobs across industries and occupations require digital skills… This is not an option. Everyone in the economy need digital skills.”
Bergson-Shilcock added that giving priority to online learning availability makes particular sense when the administration is proposing to eliminate Job Corps, the nation’s premiere job training program for young people, while also seeking a $1.8 billion cut in overall Workforce Investment Opportunity Act (WIOA) funding.
If only it stopped there.
Allocation of billions of dollars in federal funding for social, education, and health programs is based in large part on the annual American Community Survey (ACS), which tracks vital demographic and economic trends across the country. Households are asked to respond online.
The other major component in data-driven funding allocation comes from the decennial census where there has been a serious undercount of racial and ethnic households, especially immigrant ones.
The difference in census response between the least-connected and best-connected areas is striking. It translates into a final 7 percent census undercount—greater than for racial/ethnic minorities overall. In rural areas, the correlation between the proportion of households in a community with broadband access and lowered ACS response is dramatic.
Census undercount and ACS underrepresentation then directly translates into loss of revenue for crucial programs such as compensatory education for school districts with the highest levels of poverty.
California deserves its fair share of funding and needs the flexibility to address not only barriers to broadband accessibility but also the issue of affordability. The California Digital Equity plan found that 61 percent of the households that currently lack broadband access (that is, about 2 million) saw cost as the main barrier to being connected.
Politically motivated efforts to punish California for its efforts to improve disadvantaged families’ lives and community well-being are also evidence of the current federal regime’s disregard for states’ rights despite its’ rhetoric celebrating the benefits of a smaller federal government and shift toward local government flexibility.
The Trump administration’s revision to BEAD funding guidelines is a stealthy political assault on rural communities with concentrations of low-income ethnic minorities and immigrants. It erodes access to online resources crucial for effectively taking care of one’s health and economic opportunities, and for ensuring fair and informed political engagement.
In effect, the new guidelines stand in the way of progress toward the fundamental Constitutional goal of achieving “a more perfect union” in the information-intense 21st century.
Ed Kissam has researched census data issues for more than three decades and published extensively on differential undercount of farmworkers and Latinos. He is a trustee of the WKF Charitable Giving Fund.
