After four months of silence, it’s time for DeWine to stand up for Ohio’s Digital Opportunity Plan 12 Sep 8:04 AM (last month)
It’s time for Governor DeWine to stand up for his administration’s own Digital Opportunity Plan.
On May 8, Donald Trump posted a Truth Social rant condemning the Digital Equity Act as “UNCONSTITUTIONAL… RACIST and ILLEGAL”, The following evening, the U.S. Commerce Department began notifying state broadband offices that their Digital Equity Capacity Grants, totalling more than $800 million, had been peremptorily cancelled.
States and territories had received these grants on a formula basis mandated by the 2021 infrastructure act, which appropriated the funds. Each state had spent two to three years developing and submitting a detailed plan for spending its allocation. Most if not all had signed grant agreements with the Commerce Department. Their varied digital equity (or “digital opportunity”) initiatives — digital navigators, community training programs, device assistance, workforce training, rural telehealth support — were teed up and ready to proceed.
Then, overnight, they weren’t.
That was nineteen weeks ago. I wrote at the time:
With $1.4 billion in Digital Equity Capacity Grants for states and territories at stake, not to mention more than $600 million in already-announced Digital Equity Competitive Grants involving hundreds of communities, the White House’s attempt to cancel the Digital Equity Act is certainly headed for court.
There’s also likely to be significant pushback from Congress — possibly from both sides of the aisle. (How will Senator Murkowski react to Alaska’s loss of $30 million in Competitive Grant awards? What can we expect from Senator Husted, who as Lieutenant Governor was the public face of BroadbandOhio until a few months ago?)
Boy, did I get that wrong.
Yes, a handful of Democratic Senators used Arielle Roth’s confirmation hearings to politely push the incoming chief of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration — which “owns” the DEA programs — for a promise to revive Digital Equity Act funding. (Roth, about to go to work for Trump and Lutnick, artfully evaded.) Also, several state Congressional delegations have sent stern letters to Commerce Secretary Lutnick. In a former life, mild-mannered efforts like these might have had some effect. Not any more.
But strikingly, not a single state — Blue or Red — has yet gone to court to try to recover its lost DEA money.
Where this leaves Ohioans
Ohio’s state broadband office, like its counterparts in many states, now finds itself with an official “Ohio Digital Opportunity Plan” but zero funding to carry it out.
BroadbandOhio still has its Ohio Digital Inclusion Grant Program featured on its website, even though it’s suspended for lack of funding. About half of Ohio’s DEA Capacity Grant was earmarked for local ODIGP grants around the state. The deadline for an initial round of proposals was April 11; the state has them in hand. All that’s missing to move forward with awards is the money.
There’s never been any chance that Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost would cross the Trump regime by suing to recover the BroadbandOhio’s $24 million Digital Equity Capacity Grant. But Ohio’s community digital inclusion programs once could cling to a thin hope that legal action by other states might result in the return of Ohio’s money. After nineteen weeks, that hope has faded from thin to nonexistent.
If Ohio’s Governor and AG won’t put up a fight with the White House to recover the Federal DEA funding that was supposed to launch the state’s Digital Opportunity Plan, then Plan B should be obvious: Governor DeWine needs to find $24 million to replace it.
Leftover BEAD funding
This could be less difficult than it sounds. BroadbandOhio just submitted its “final proposal” to the Commerce Department for using $793 million in Federal rural broadband funds from BEAD, the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment Program. For a variety of reasons Ohio has only proposed to spend $277 million on BEAD’s main purpose, i.e. subsidizing the deployment of physical broadband infrastructure where it’s needed to make 100/20 Mbps Internet available to rural homes that can’t get it now. That total may change before the Commerce Dept approves Ohio’s plan, but the final result will almost certainly leave at least $500 million of Ohio’s BEAD allocation unspent.
Under the law that created BEAD, those leftover funds are supposed to be available to the state to spend on lower-priority broadband initiatives. Permissible uses include improving connectivity for community anchor institutions, data and mapping, providing reduced-cost broadband for tenants in low-income multi-family buildings, and “subgrants for… broadband adoption, including programs to provide affordable internet-capable devices.” The last category would cover most of the activities proposed in Ohio’s Digital Opportunity Plan.
Of course Lutnick and Trump don’t intend to let the states use their BEAD allocations as the law provides. In June, Lutnick issued new BEAD rules that, among other things, declared that “Funding for allowable non-deployment purposes is under review” and rescinded all prior approvals of state plans to non-deployment spending. It’s obvious that the Commerce Secretary plans to claw back as much BEAD money from the states as he can. It’s equally obvious that his planned clawback will violate the law that created BEAD, which explicitly authorizes states to use funds not spent on deployment to support broadband access in other ways.
Ohio’s Governor and Attorney-General haven’t been willing to fight for $24 million in Digital Equity Act money. Are they more likely to push back against the loss of hundreds of millions of dollars in BEAD funding? Only time will tell. But that’s one straightforward way for DeWine to secure replacement funding for the state’s Digital Opportunity Plan: Challenge or persuade the national leaders of his own party to follow the law on BEAD non-deployment funds.
If BroadbandOhio managed to keep even a fraction of its remaining BEAD allocation for non-deployment initiatives, its ODOP funding problem could be solved.
DeWine can find the money
Or, failing that… the Governor can simply look to the state’s own resources.
DeWine recently signed off on a $203 billion biennial state operating budget, of which $149 billion is non-Federal dollars. $24 million amounts to a trivial .012% of the total operating budget, or .016% of the non-Federal portion.
Also, this is a state whose leaders just managed to find $600 million in the couch cushions to subsidize a single professional football stadium.
One way or another, Governor DeWine has the ability to find $24 million to follow through on his own administration’s very modest plan to reduce Ohio’s digital divide.
BEAD won’t close Ohio’s digital divide
Counting the $277 million in the state’s just-announced BEAD Final Proposal, Federal and state commitments to rural broadband infrastructure subsidies in Ohio since 2020 now total between $750 and $800 million. Once that money has all been spent, between 350,000 and 400,000 Ohio residences are supposed to have options to subscribe to high-speed Internet service that they didn’t have before. Almost all of those residences are in rural or rural-suburban communities. Many politicians and some media will tell us this is the end of Ohio’s digital divide.
But the U.S. Census’ 2024 America Community Survey data, just released yesterday, shows almost 1.2 million Ohio households without wireline broadband subscriptions (DSL, cable or fiber) at any speed last year — 806,000 in urban areas vs. 367,000 in rural areas of the state. So even if all that spending on rural connectivity succeeds, there will likely be between 900,000 and a million Ohio households, mostly in urban areas, who still don’t have home broadband service other than (maybe) a smartphone. Their lack of connection isn’t the result of gaps in broadband infrastructure. We know from research and experience that it has a number of causes, but two of the most important are the cost of service (poorer households are far more likely to be unconnected than richer ones) and lack of digital skills.
The new ACS data also shows 1.1 million Ohio households without desktop or laptop computers in 2024, with an even greater share in urban areas — 844,000 urban vs. 266,000 rural.
Helping unconnected urban and rural Ohioans find affordable Internet options, learn digital skills, and get affordable, reliable home computers are exactly what the Ohio Digital Opportunity Plan is meant to accomplish.
The Digital Equity Act funding may be gone, but Ohio’s carefully developed plan remains, along with the persistent digital divide it aims to reduce for a million urban and rural households.
Governor DeWine owes it to those households to stand up and make sure the Ohio Digital Opportunity Plan — his BroadbandOhio’s plan — gets the funding it needs to proceed.
Trump terminates Digital Equity Act funding: $35 million in Ohio awards threatened 11 May 7:31 PM (5 months ago)
The Trump Administration has finally dropped its hammer on the Digital Equity Act.
Late last Friday, state and territorial broadband offices, and at least some of the 65 announced winners of national Digital Equity Competitive Grant awards (those with contracts already signed, perhaps others), got the word via emails from the U.S. Commerce Department: Your award has been terminated.
This followed a Thursday post by President Trump on Truth Social which called the DEA “totally UNCONSTITUTIONAL”, “woke handouts based on race” and “a RACIST and ILLEGAL $2.5 BILLION giveaway”.
The idea that DEA funding is racially discriminatory, and therefore illegal/unconstitutional, originated last November in a letter from Texas Senator Ted Cruz to Assistant Secretary of Commerce Alan Davidson objecting to the Competitive Grant Program’s listing of “individuals who are members of a racial or ethnic minority group” as one of eight “covered groups”, at least one of which would have to be served to receive funding. Of course this list of covered groups comes straight from the Act itself and also includes veterans, rural residents, senior citizens, people with disabilities, people learning English or with limited English literacy, and people with household incomes below 150% of poverty. Nonetheless, Cruz (whose senior technology staffer has been nominated to take over Davidson’s job) argued that any consideration of race in awarding Federal funds is a “racial classification” that violates the Equal Protection Clause — and therefore the Competitive Grant Program should immediately “halt issuing Program grants”.
Trump and Commerce Secretary Lutnick have built on Cruz’ tortured logic to construct a full-fantasy woke version of the DEA, as a convenient MAGAverse rationale to kill the real thing.
Friday’s termination emails repeat the Truth Social version of this rationale in slightly calmer language:
That’s from the notice received by the National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA) cancelling its Competitive Grant Program award. Emails received by states and territories cancelling their Digital Equity Capacity Grants use similar language about that program.
Notice that Trump and Lutnick aren’t claiming racism, discrimination or woke-ism by any grant award recipients. They’re saying the Commerce Department’s program rules are unconstitutional because of a built-in racial preference in its list of covered populations, which is copied verbatim, as required, from the Act itself. So states and organizations that won grants by following those rules — even if their proposals were entirely for services to other covered groups, such as veterans or seniors or farm families — are now getting them yanked back.
The Commerce Department’s actions threaten at least $35 million in already-awarded grants for digital navigation and training, affordable devices and Internet adoption support for Ohioans. That amount includes:
- State of Ohio (BroadbandOhio), $23 million — the state’s current Digital Equity Capacity Grant, awarded in November. $12 miliion has been allocated to fund competitive grants to community digital inclusion projects around the state, with an initial application deadline of April 11. BroadbandOhio is also seeking contractors to develop statewide strategies for affordable computers, digital inclusion services in state correctional facilities, and digital navigator program support.
- United Way of Greater Cincinnati, $8.8 million — a national Digital Equity Competitive Grant supporting Learning Hubs and Digital Navigators.
- Jewish Family Services (Columbus) and Northwest Ohio Community Action Commission (Defiance), $1.7 million each. JFS and NOCAC are among about a dozen local digital navigator programs that partnered with NDIA in a successful national Competitive Grant proposal.
There are at least three other Competitive Grant awardees whose project descriptions promise some unspecified activity or impact in Ohio. In addition, more than $300 million of the Competitive Grant Program’s 2024-25 appropriated funding has yet to be awarded, with a number of Ohio proposals still outstanding. And under the existing Infrastructure Act appropriations, both the State Capacity Grant Program and the national Competitive Grant Program have more money coming in 2026.
So in theory, Ohio could reasonably expect to receive more Digital Equity Act dollars — if the whole thing survives Trump’s attack.
Will these grant terminations stick? Is the Digital Equity Act dead?
With $1.4 billion in Digital Equity Capacity Grants for states and territories at stake, not to mention more than $600 million in already-announced Digital Equity Competitive Grants involving hundreds of communities, the White House’s attempt to cancel the Digital Equity Act is certainly headed for court.
There’s also likely to be significant pushback from Congress — possibly from both sides of the aisle. (How will Senator Murkowski react to Alaska’s loss of $30 million in Competitive Grant awards? What can we expect from Senator Husted, who as Lieutenant Governor was the public face of BroadbandOhio until a few months ago?)
But of course the White House attack on the DEA is just part of a much larger struggle in which the efficacy of courts and Congress remains questionable. Trump has now personally condemned the DEA in the strongest terms. It’s publicly targeted for elimination by the Commerce Secretary, whose department “owns” it. The Commerce Department agency that administers DEA’s programs — the National Telecommunications and Information Administration — is about to have a new Administrator, Arielle Roth, whose former boss and patron in the Senate kicked off the attack on those programs in November with a letter that Roth herself, as Cruz’ main technology staffer, might well have drafted. Both Lutnick and Roth have other broadband policy goals on their front burners, starting with “BEAD reform” and spectrum.
So reversing Friday’s grant terminations and getting the Digital Equity Act’s programs back on track, as they were intended by Congress in 2021, will be a very heavy lift, even with successful litigation and strong Congressional support.
We’ll see in the next day or two how many state governments are ready to make a fight of it. On the community side, Angela Siefer of NDIA says: “This is not over. NDIA is exploring all options.”
Stay tuned.
CYC opens Ashtabula Community Technology Action Center 4 Feb 11:04 AM (8 months ago)
Connect Your Community is launching a new “Community Technology Action Center” to promote digital literacy and affordable technology access in Ashtabula.
The new center in downtown Ashtabula offers free facilities and support to help regional digital inclusion service providers extend their services to local residents. Its first partner is the Oak Hill Collaborative, based in Youngstown, which will begin offering free twice-a-week “Digital Advantage” classes on February 12.
In addition to basic computer skills training, Oak Hill’s program makes free refurbished laptops available to qualifying participants. CYC is now looking for ways the center can facilitate access to affordable refurbished devices for more local households.
Ashtabula is a small (17-18,000), historically industrial port city in a mostly rural county. The city’s 31% poverty rate is about the same as Cleveland’s. The most recent American Community Survey found 30% of Ashtabula households lacked wireline broadband, and 34% lacked a laptop or desktop computer. More than 6,000 households in the city’s ZIP code, 44004 — which includes adjacent suburbs — were enrolled in the Affordable Connectivity Program when it ended last Spring. There’s clearly a need for digital inclusion resources — basic skills training, affordable devices and connectivity — but little local infrastructure to make them available.
CYC sees our new Community Technology Action Center as a possible model for creating that infrastructure at a very modest cost, relying on collaboration, existing regional resources, and a no-frills but welcoming “home base” in the community.
Now the good news: “Worst connected” Detroit and Cleveland are also “most improved” 16 Sep 2024 1:32 PM (last year)
Okay, that last post was the bad news from the American Community Survey data released Thursday. Now here’s the good news:
Among cities with 100,000 or more households, the two worst-connected cities, Detroit and Cleveland, have also had the biggest percentage reductions in households without wireline broadband connections since 2019.
Detroit added more than 41,000 households with cable, fiber or DSL subscriptions between 2019 and 2023, even while its total household count shrank by about 12,000; this took the city’s percentage of households without wireline from 46.3% down to 32.2%. In the same four years Cleveland added almost 25,000 wireline broadband accounts while losing about 3,000 households, reducing its no-wireline percentage from 46.0% to 32.2%.
As the chart shows, most of these gains happened between 2019 and 2021, the years of COVID lockdowns and mass enforced participation in online education, work and commerce. The second half of 2021 also brought the Federal Emergency Broadband Benefit program, which by the end of the year was helping about 82,000 households in Cuyahoga County and 108,000 in Wayne County pay for either wireless or wireline Internet.
By the time the EBB morphed into the Affordable Connectivity Program in January 2022, schools, workplaces, restaurants and churches had re-opened, but the increase in home broadband connections remained, and even continued to grow modestly — undoubtedly a success marker for the ACP.
Of course this sequence of events happened in cities throughout the country, but not necessarily to the same extent. To get a better perspective on this year’s “worst-connected” list and how the urban digital divide has changed since the beginning of the pandemic, CYC has used the same data set — ACS Table B28002, “Presence and Types of Internet Subscriptions in Household” — to compare the same large U.S. cities’ degree of improvement in home connectivity since 2019.
This new analysis looks at one of the two ACS statistics featured in all of our Worst Connected Large Cities reports — the percentage of households in each community that lack subscriptions for cable, fiber optic or DSL broadband Internet services, otherwise known as “wireline” broadband.
- We calculated the decrease (or increase) in the number of households with no wireline broadband service from 2019 to 2023, for each of the eighty cities included in our 2019 WCLC analysis.
- We averaged the total number of households in 2019 and 2023 for each city.
- We divided the numerical decrease (or increase) in “no wireline” households by the averaged total of all households to get each city’s improvement percentage.
- We ranked the eighty cities by these percentages, from “most improved” (the biggest percentage decrease in no-wireline households) to “least improved” (the smallest percentage decrease or biggest increase).
Here’s what we got:
Here are the ten “most improved” cities for home wireline broadband:
Seven of these ten most-improved cities (Detroit, Cleveland, Memphis, New Orleans, Miami. Toledo and St. Louis) were among the ten worst-connected in 2019; Milwaukee ranked 11th on that list and Fresno ranked 16th. Six of them were still among the ten worst-connected for 2023, and three more were in last year’s top 20.
In other words, some of the greatest progress has happened in cities — like Cleveland! — that needed it most, and still do.
That’s a credit to the community digital inclusion movements in those cities, to the many local governments and school boards that rose to the occasion in 2020 and 2021 to help school families and others get connected during the lockdowns, and to the Internet providers who stepped up to help with affordable plans and collaborations. And it’s strong evidence of the effectiveness of the Emergency Broadband Benefit and Affordable Connectivity Program in communities where the need for affordable broadband is greatest… while they lasted.
Now in 2024 the big question is: Will the improved home broadband access rates in Cleveland, Detroit, and other U.S. cities survive the end of the ACP, and the resulting bigger monthly bills that started hitting many of their newly connected households in June?
Cleveland and Detroit lead worst-connected large cities of 2023 12 Sep 2024 1:30 PM (last year)
The U.S. Census’ 2023 American Community Survey 1-Year Estimates came on line this morning at data.census.gov/. Once again, CYC is taking this opportunity to compare the recent home broadband connection rates of all U.S. cities of 100,000 households or more, in what we call our “worst-connected large cities” list.
We regret to report that Cleveland and Detroit still led that list in 2023.
Each year, we compare all U.S. 100K-household cities (there are 86 this year) on the basis of three numbers calculated from ACS Table 28004: Presence And Types Of Internet Subscriptions In Household for the prior year:
- Each city’s total number of households;
- The number of those total households which lack “Broadband of any type” (which includes households with Internet only via mobile data plans); and
- The number of those total households which lack “Broadband such as cable, fiber optic or DSL”.
The second and third of these numbers are calculated as percentages of the first, and the cities’s percentages are ranked highest to lowest, i.e. “worst connected” to “best connected”, like this:
Above: Excerpt from CYC’s new “Worst connected U.S. cities” list.
Click here to see CYC’s complete list of “Worst connected U.S. cities with 100,000 or more households, 2023”. (Document opens in new tab. Click on it for full size.)
In 2023, only five cities had wireline (cable-fiber-DSL) non-connection rates above 30%. Detroit topped the list at 32.19%, followed by Cleveland at 32.15%. Given the ACS’s margins of error, this has to be called a tie for first place.
But there was no tie in the percentage of households with no broadband connections of any type. 14.7% of Cleveland households — about 25,000 — still had no broadband Internet subscriptions at all last year, even in the form of data plans for mobile devices. Detroit was in second-worst place but not close, at 12.6%. Only nine other cities, including Toledo and Cincinnati, had more than 10% of their households in this situation.
For many years, and especially since 2020, both Cleveland and Detroit have seen strenuous efforts by community organizations, public officials and funders to lower barriers to broadband access and digital literacy. The bad news from the Census today: We still have a long, long way to go.
You can see past versions of CYC’s worst-connected big cities releases at these links: 2021, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2013.