Yesterday a federal district court judge ruled that Digital Equity Act programs should resume, although without any of the Act’s original race-based factors, which the judge deemed to be unconstitutional.

In response to the ruling in the on-going lawsuit filed by the National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA), Christopher Mitchell, Director of the Community Broadband Networks initiative at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR), made the following statement:

“Yesterday’s ruling on the Digital Equity Competitive Grant Program is, on balance, a victory. The National Digital Inclusion Alliance deserves enormous credit for fighting to get to this point. The court affirmed what should have been obvious all along: the Trump administration had no legitimate basis to hold this program hostage. The only real question now is how quickly NTIA moves to actually implement it.”

“The removal of racial and ethnic minorities as a designated ‘covered population’ are  a loss because the Trump Administration continues to find ways to undermine populations that have been historically disadvantaged.  But I don’t think it will significantly change who the program actually serves or what work gets done on the ground. The Digital Equity Act’s continued focus on low-income communities, older adults and veterans means that the people who most need to be prioritized will still be prioritized. Due to historic discrimination, many racial minorities will remain the focus of the program due to their disproportionately low income.”

“Digital equity work does not cost the federal government money – our taxpayer dollars are used inefficiently when millions of people cannot access telehealth and similar services. Additionally, the benefits of federal investments into new Internet networks are greatly enhanced when more people are able to take advantage of modern technology.” 

*The following story by Broadband Breakfast Reporter Jericho Casper was originally published here.

Trump administration attorneys told a federal judge that the Digital Equity Act's competitive grant program could likely continue if a challenged provision is struck down.

During a hearing before U.S. District Judge John Bates, Commerce Department attorney Patrick Butler argued that a statutory provision identifying certain racial and ethnic groups as “covered populations” could be severed from the law if found unconstitutional.

(Should that happen, it would allow) the rest of the program to move forward without considering race. 

The clarification came during a motion hearing in a suit brought by the National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA), which challenged the administration's decision to halt the Digital Equity Act program after President Donald Trump characterized it as unconstitutional.

The hearing, held in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on June 11, was made public Monday.

During the hearing, Bates repeatedly questioned both sides about whether the constitutional issue could be resolved now, at the motion-to-dismiss stage, and whether any part of the case would remain if the challenged provision were severed and the grant program continued.

Justice Department and Commerce Department attorneys argued that the disputed provision could be removed while leaving the rest of the program intact.

“It's our position that the racial classification is severable,”  Butler told the court. “If you decide that the racial classification is unconstitutional ... and then you sever it, we would obviously apply the grant program without considering race.”

In yet another bruising blow in the fight to ensure equitable access to high-speed Internet service, an appeals court struck down federal rules this week that aimed to combat digital redlining.

The ruling came despite a mandate from the bipartisan infrastructure law passed during the Biden administration that directed the FCC to develop “rules to facilitate equal access to broadband internet access service” that would prevent “digital discrimination of access based on income level, race, ethnicity, color, religion, or national origin.”

Not adopted until 2023 after a lengthy rulemaking process and public comment period, when the FCC published its final digital discrimination rules it gave the agency the authority to penalize Internet Service Providers (ISPs) whose policies resulted in “disparate impact,” even if the agency couldn’t prove deliberate discriminatory intent.

Among the real-world “disparate impact” examples advocates presented to the FCC were instances such as when residents of Hope Village, a mostly Black neighborhood in Detroit, experienced a 45-day Internet outage during the height of the pandemic lockdowns – as well as studies that found many large providers charge poor, minority neighborhoods significantly more money for slower broadband access than their more affluent, less diverse counterparts.

As digital inclusion advocates across the nation push for the restoration of Digital Equity Act funding a year after President Trump unilaterally “terminated” the bipartisan Congressional law, the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) has approved $3.29 million in grants aimed at dramatically shoring up digital training and public broadband access in communities across the state.

All told, more than 18 new digital literacy projects and three expanded public broadband access projects will be funded, impacting more than 16,000 Californians.

According to the CPUC announcement, the projects, paid for from the California Advanced Services Fund (CASF) Broadband Adoption Account, will provide digital literacy training to 5,345 participants and deliver broadband access to 10,800 additional community members in underserved areas.

The funded CPUC projects run the gamut across all corners of the state, from $180,325 to provide digital literacy and data skills training for veterans in Santa Barbara and Ventura counties, to $751,780 to help fund five different digital literacy projects assisting older Americans in Alameda County, Orange County, Riverside County, San Francisco, and San Jose.

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The biggest grant, $1.19 million, will be used to help fund eight Golden Bridge Program digital literacy projects serving seniors, low-income residents, justice-involved youth, and high school students in the Sacramento region.

The first time Belinda Parker-Mendoza set foot on the campus of San Antonio College was to get her cap and gown for graduation, having earned her Associate’s Degree in Business Administration.

It was not only a first for her. She was the first person in her entire family to earn a diploma of any kind.

The gateway to that moment, the 45-year-old mother says, came in 2022, when she signed up for a digital skills training course offered through AmeriCorps VISTA at one of the city’s Opportunity Home apartment complexes where she lives on San Antonio’s cultural and historic East Side.

“If I didn’t have a laptop and the Internet, none of that would’ve happened,” she explains, sitting in her fourth-floor apartment before diving into a writing assignment for one of her classes as she works towards her bachelor’s degree.

She does her school work on a laptop – a refurbished Dell computer she earned through the digital skills training program. Before that, she didn’t have a computer or Internet access at home. The class provided her a laptop and through the Americorps program, she was able to enroll in the now-expired Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), which allowed her to get home Internet service for the first time.

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“Thank God,” she says. “Because when the ACP ended, I was working in the (Americorps) program – and getting paid – so it worked out.”

For millions of others, it did not.

*The following story by Broadband Breakfast Reporter Kelcie Lee was originally published here.

The lawsuit over the Trump administration’s suspension of grants from the $2.75 billion program to close the digital divide may come to a pause. 

The National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA) filed a motion Wednesday to put its lawsuit suing President Donald Trump on hold, because there is a similar case further along that would control the outcome. 

NDIA was a key player in the Digital Equity Act (DEA), having been one of 65 recommended awardees that were blindsided after having spent two years building plans approved by the federal government. 

The DEA was a Biden-era program from the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021 (IIJA) that worked to ensure Americans could access, afford and fully participate in the increasingly digital society. 

In May 2025, Trump halted $1.25 billion in DEA competitive grants, explaining that the act was unconstitutional, racist and illegal.

Close to a 1,000 broadband-minded registrants attended yesterday’s listening session on how to spend an estimated $21 billion in “non-deployment” funds states should have at their disposal from the federal BEAD (Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment) program.

Hosted by the National Telecommunication and Information Administration (NTIA), the Commerce Department agency administering the program, the online listening session featured about 50 selected speakers. Most of those who spoke advocated using the money to tackle the array of non-infrastructure barriers to expand broadband (affordability, device distribution, and digital skills programs) – made all the more urgent in light of the Trump administration’s sudden “termination” of the Digital Equity Act last year.

Though it runs counter to the bipartisan infrastructure law that established the program, a handful of speakers actually suggested the funds simply be returned to the U.S. Treasury, presumably to “save taxpayer dollars.”

One speaker even tried to make the case that money Congress explicitly intended to address the nation’s massive digital divide should instead be given to Air Traffic Controllers.