FCC Filing - e-Rate Sunset

SUMMARY

The Commission's Notice of Proposed Rulemaking and Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (“NPRM”) in this proceeding asks, among other things, whether the E-Rate program should be “limited or sunset” and whether the Commission possesses authority — within the Children's Internet Protection Act (“CIPA”) or otherwise — to regulate the amount of time students spend using screens in schools and libraries. The commenter respectfully urges the Commission to answer both questions in the negative. Congress designed E-Rate as an ongoing universal service obligation under Section 254(h) of the Communications Act, not a program with a built-in expiration date, and the near-universal connectivity the Commission cites as grounds for sunset reflects the program's success, not its obsolescence. Separately, neither CIPA nor any other provision of the Communications Act gives the Commission authority to set screen-time limits, mandate opt-out regimes for instructional methods, or otherwise regulate how teachers and librarians use networks once they are safely filtered. That authority, to the extent it exists at all, rests with Congress, the states, and local school boards and library authorities — not with a communications regulator. Both proposals, if adopted, would exceed the Commission's statutory authority and would be vulnerable to the same “major questions” objections that have unsettled other recent assertions of expansive agency power.

I. INTRODUCTION AND STATEMENT OF INTEREST

The commenter respectfully submits these comments in response to the Commission's NPRM in the above-captioned proceeding, released June 4, 2026, and formally adopted at the Commission's June 25, 2026, Open Meeting. The commenter has a direct interest in the continued, stable operation of the E-Rate program as a source of affordable connectivity for the nation's schools and libraries, and in preserving the historical division of authority between the Commission, which administers a communications subsidy, and state and local educational authorities, which set curriculum and instructional policy. These comments address the most consequential questions the NPRM poses: whether the Commission should narrow, limit, or sunset the E-Rate program (NPRM ¶¶ 12–19); whether the Commission has authority, under CIPA or otherwise, to regulate children's screen time on E-Rate-funded networks (NPRM ¶¶ 20–23, 38–42); the five core lines of inquiry summarized in the Commission's Fact Sheet; and, more briefly, the consultant-oversight and administrative-streamlining proposals in the accompanying FNPRM. For the reasons below, the Commission should reject the sunset and screen-time proposals outright and should substantially revise the consultant-oversight and streamlining proposals before adopting them.

II. THE COMMISSION SHOULD REJECT PROPOSALS TO NARROW, LIMIT, OR SUNSET THE E-RATE PROGRAM

A. Congress Did Not Design E-Rate as a Self-Terminating Program

The NPRM asks whether “Congress' directive in section 254(h) of the Communications Act” has “been satisfied” and whether the program “should be limited or sunset to reflect today's extensive connectivity rates.” NPRM ¶ 12. Section 254(h)(1)(B) and (2)(B) of the Communications Act direct the Commission to establish support mechanisms to ensure that schools and libraries have access to advanced telecommunications and information services “at rates less than the amounts charged for similar services to other parties.” 47 U.S.C. § 254(h)(1)(B), (2)(B). Nothing in that text, or in the broader universal service framework Congress enacted in the Telecommunications Act of 1996, conditions the subsidy on a static, one-time achievement of “connectivity” after which support automatically lapses. To the contrary, Section 254 establishes universal service as an evolving obligation, one the Commission itself has recognized requires periodic re-evaluation of what “advanced telecommunications and information services” means as technology changes — not a countdown to a finish line. If Congress intended E-Rate to expire once schools obtained basic connectivity, it could have written a sunset provision into the statute, as it has done in other programs. It did not.

B. “Near-Universal Connectivity” Conflates Initial Access With Ongoing Adequacy

The NPRM's premise — that “virtually all schools report having broadband connectivity and Wi-Fi,” NPRM ¶ 12 — measures the wrong variable. E-Rate was never solely about whether a school building has a wire crossing its threshold; it is about whether schools and libraries can sustainably afford the connectivity, bandwidth, and internal network infrastructure that today's educational and library service delivery requires and will require tomorrow. Bandwidth demand has grown continuously since the program's inception, driven by digital curricula, statewide testing platforms, video-based instruction, library digital collections, and, increasingly, tools that depend on stable high-bandwidth connections. A school that had “adequate” connectivity in 2016 may be significantly under-provisioned in 2026, and the same will be true again in 2036. Treating a snapshot of current connectivity rates as proof that the program's mission is “accomplished” ignores that the mission itself — keeping pace with the connectivity that advanced telecommunications and information services require — is a moving target by design. Nor does the NPRM account for the substantial category two need that remains: internal connections, basic maintenance, and managed internal broadband services, which together with category one totaled well over $3 billion in requested funding in funding year 2025 alone. NPRM ¶ 12 ($1.806 billion in category one requests; $1.418 billion in category two requests for FY 2025). That level of continuing demand is not the signature of a program that has outlived its purpose.

C. Under-Subscription of the Funding Cap Does Not Show the Program Has Fulfilled Its Mission

The NPRM observes that “demand for program funds has consistently fallen under the cap in recent years, while the program's annual funding cap has steadily increased.” NPRM ¶ 12. That observation supports no inference about need. Demand falling under an inflation-adjusted cap is at least as consistent with applicants facing administrative burdens, uncertainty about the program's future, or conservative local budgeting in the face of a multi-year, unpredictable federal commitment, as it is with the conclusion that schools and libraries no longer need the support. Indeed, an agency actively signaling that it may narrow or eliminate a program is itself likely to depress the very demand cited as evidence the program is no longer needed — applicants understandably hesitate to build multi-year technology plans, undertake competitive bidding, or expand category two requests for infrastructure they are uncertain will continue to receive support. The Commission should not treat a symptom of its own regulatory uncertainty as proof of the program's obsolescence.

D. Restructuring the Discount Matrix or Eliminating Special Construction Support Would Harm the Communities Section 254(h) Was Designed to Protect

The NPRM asks whether to “phase out E-Rate funding for schools and libraries in areas with the lowest NSLP participation rates,” NPRM ¶ 17, to eliminate or limit special construction and self-provisioned network support given the availability of BEAD funding, NPRM ¶ 14, and to limit support to “rural areas” or “areas served by a single provider,” NPRM ¶ 18. Each of these proposals risks the same error: treating the existence of another federal program, or an aggregate national connectivity statistic, as a substitute for the community-specific cost and poverty data that the current discount matrix and special-construction rules were built to capture. BEAD is oriented toward last-mile deployment to unserved and underserved locations; it is not designed to fund the recurring operating costs, contract cycles, or category two upgrades that E-Rate supports, and its build-out timelines do not track the E-Rate funding year. Eliminating special construction eligibility before BEAD-funded infrastructure is actually complete and operational would leave exactly the highest-cost, most rural applicants the program was designed to prioritize without a bridge between programs. Since the Commission added self-provisioned construction as an eligible service in funding year 2016, the program has disbursed approximately $136.6 million for that purpose — a modest fraction of overall E-Rate spending, but one concentrated in the communities with the fewest alternatives. NPRM ¶ 12. Restructuring the discount matrix in the name of efficiency, without a demonstrated and specific record that today's poorest and most rural applicants are over-subsidized, would undermine rather than advance the statute's purpose of ensuring affordable access “particularly in rural and high-cost areas.” 47 U.S.C. § 254(b)(3).

E. A Fundamental Restructuring or Sunset of E-Rate Is a “Major Question” Requiring Clear Congressional Authorization

Even setting aside the statutory text, the scale of the change contemplated here — unwinding or dramatically narrowing a multi-billion-dollar program that has operated continuously for three decades and that Congress created by name in the Telecommunications Act of 1996 — is precisely the kind of “extraordinary case” in which courts expect clear congressional authorization before an agency claims the power to act. See West Virginia v. EPA, 597 U.S. 697, 721–24 (2022) (agencies must point to “clear congressional authorization” for actions of vast economic and political significance). Section 254 gives the Commission ratemaking and support-mechanism authority; it does not contain, and the legislative history does not suggest, any indication that Congress delegated to the Commission the freestanding authority to decide that the program it created should be wound down once a self-selected connectivity benchmark is reached. Relatedly, following Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, 603 U.S. 369 (2024), courts no longer extend deference to an agency's own reading of ambiguous statutory terms. A reviewing court asked to assess whether Section 254(h) permits the Commission to sunset the program it was directed to establish will exercise independent judgment about the best reading of the statute — and the more plausible reading is that Congress imposed an ongoing support obligation, not a program with a hidden expiration date the Commission alone may trigger through rulemaking.

F. The Practical Costs of Instability Fall Hardest on the Applicants Least Able to Absorb Them

Schools and libraries build multi-year technology and budget plans around the reasonable expectation of continued E-Rate discounts; service providers price and staff multi-year contracts on the same assumption. The NPRM's own history illustrates the disruption that follows abrupt changes in eligible services: the 2023–2024 expansions to bus Wi-Fi and hotspot support were reversed in 2025 after applicants had already built those services into their plans. NPRM ¶ 14. A sunset or fundamental restructuring of the core program would multiply that disruption many times over, and would fall hardest on exactly the low-income and rural districts that have the least budgetary slack to absorb a sudden funding cliff. The Commission should weigh that real-world cost heavily before treating a connectivity statistic as sufficient justification for unwinding a program on which so many schools and libraries have come to rely.

III. THE COMMISSION LACKS AUTHORITY TO REGULATE SCREEN TIME AND SHOULD NOT ADOPT SCREEN-TIME RULES UNDER CIPA OR ANY OTHER PROVISION OF THE COMMUNICATIONS ACT

A. CIPA's Text Confines the Commission's Role to Filtering and Internet Safety Policies, Not the Pedagogical Use of Screens

CIPA requires schools and libraries receiving E-Rate support to certify that they are enforcing an internet safety policy that includes a “technology protection measure” — a filter — with respect to obscenity, child pornography, and material harmful to minors, and that addresses monitoring of minors' online activities and unauthorized access. See 47 U.S.C. § 254(h), (l). Every operative term in that statute is keyed to specific, unlawful, or harmful content, not to the quantity of time a student spends looking at a screen. The NPRM nonetheless asks whether “excessive screen time” could itself be treated as “inappropriate for minors” under CIPA, NPRM ¶ 32, and whether “technology protection measures should be required to include filtering at the network level” that encompasses “limits on screen time.” NPRM ¶ 27. Screen time, standing alone, is not obscene, is not child pornography, and is not “harmful to minors” as CIPA defines that term — a definition tied to sexual content and community standards, not duration of use. See 47 U.S.C. § 254(h)(7)(G). Reading a duration-based restriction into a content-based filtering statute stretches CIPA well past its text and past what Congress could plausibly have intended when it enacted a statute aimed at shielding children from obscene and pornographic material online.

B. Section 254(l) Expressly Assigns Determinations of Appropriateness to Local Authorities, Not the Commission

Congress did not leave the question of what is “inappropriate for minors” to the Commission's discretion. Section 254(l) of the Communications Act expressly provides that the determination of what matter is inappropriate for minors is a decision “to be made by the school board, local educational agency, library, or other authority responsible for making the required certification.” 47 U.S.C. § 254(l). The NPRM itself acknowledges this allocation of authority, NPRM ¶ 32, yet simultaneously asks whether the Commission should require schools to offer a parental opt-out from screen-based instruction, NPRM ¶ 21, and whether the Commission should impose “per-day limits on the number of hours children or minors can use E-Rate-funded networks and services.” NPRM ¶ 41. Both proposals would substitute the Commission's judgment for the judgment Congress explicitly assigned to local school boards, local educational agencies, and libraries. If the Commission adopts screen-time rules or a mandatory opt-out regime, it will have inverted the very allocation of decision-making authority that Section 254(l) establishes, replacing local control over instructional policy with a one-size-fits-all federal rule.

C. Screen-Time Regulation Is a Curricular and Public-Health Question Reserved to States, Localities, and Parents, Not a Communications Regulator

How much time students spend on screens during instruction is a pedagogical decision that depends on subject matter, grade level, individualized education plans, and local curricular judgment — questions squarely within the competence of state departments of education, local school boards, teachers, and parents, not the Federal Communications Commission. The Commission's expertise and statutory mandate lie in communications infrastructure and universal service support, not in curriculum design or child-development policy. The NPRM cites a 2026 Surgeon General advisory and various studies on screen time's effects on children, but concern about a public health question does not, by itself, create statutory authority for the agency that happens to administer a related subsidy to regulate that question. If Congress believes federal screen-time standards for schools are warranted, it is fully capable of legislating them, as it has done with CIPA's narrower, content-based filtering mandate and with statutes like the Protecting Children in the 21st Century Act. Congress has not done so, and the Commission should not use this rulemaking to fill that gap by creative reinterpretation of a communications statute.

D. Per-Day Screen-Time Limits Are a “Major Question” the Commission Cannot Answer Without Clear Congressional Authorization

The NPRM candidly asks, repeatedly, whether the Commission has “any statutory obligation beyond CIPA” to limit screen time and “what statutory authority” supports such a rule. NPRM ¶¶ 38–41. That the Commission must ask the question so many times, in so many alternative framings, is itself telling: no single, clear statutory hook has been identified. A rule capping the number of hours per day that millions of American schoolchildren may use school and library networks — enforced through the E-Rate program's funding conditions — would be a rule of enormous economic and social significance, reaching directly into classroom instruction nationwide. Under the major questions doctrine, an agency may not rely on a vague or ancillary grant of authority to justify action of that magnitude; it needs a clear statement from Congress. See West Virginia v. EPA, 597 U.S. at 723. Nothing in Section 254 or CIPA constitutes such a clear statement. The Commission should decline to adopt per-day screen-time limits and should say so plainly in any order resolving this proceeding, rather than leaving the question for ad hoc enforcement.

E. Extending CIPA to Personal and Third-Party Devices Exceeds the Statutory Text and Is Technically Infeasible

The NPRM asks whether CIPA's references to “its computers” should be read broadly to cover any device — including personal, third-party-owned devices — that connects to the internet through an E-Rate-funded network. NPRM ¶¶ 25–26. The statute's plain text, however, ties the filtering obligation to computers the school or library itself owns or controls: “any of its computers with Internet access.” 47 U.S.C. § 254(h)(5)(B) (emphasis added). Congress used a possessive precisely because the obligation was meant to run with institutional ownership and control, not with mere network access. Reading “its computers” to mean “any computer, regardless of ownership” would render the possessive surplusage — a reading interpretive canons instruct courts to avoid. Practically, the NPRM's own questions concede the difficulty: it asks whether schools and libraries “have the technical capability to distinguish whether it is a school- or library-owned computer or a third-party owned device,” and whether they can determine “whether the user of a third-party device is an adult or a minor.” NPRM ¶ 25. Many do not, and retrofitting authentication and device-management infrastructure to make that distinction reliably would itself impose substantial new costs on the very institutions this proceeding claims to be helping — all to enforce an obligation the statutory text does not clearly impose.

F. Revisiting the 2011 Social-Media Finding Risks Content-Based Regulation Without a Clear Statutory or Constitutional Basis

In 2011, the Commission concluded that social networking websites are not per se “harmful to minors” under CIPA, reasoning that the statute leaves the determination of what content is inappropriate to local school and library authorities and that a categorical ban would be inconsistent with CIPA's own emphasis on educating minors about appropriate online behavior. NPRM ¶ 29. The NPRM now asks whether that conclusion should be revisited in light of changes to the social media landscape. Id. Reversing that finding would risk converting CIPA — a statute aimed at obscenity, child pornography, and similarly unprotected content — into a vehicle for categorical, platform-based content regulation, raising First Amendment concerns distinct from, and considerably more serious than, the concerns CIPA was written to address. The statutory definition of “harmful to minors” requires content that, among other things, appeals to a prurient interest and lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value; an entire category of general-purpose communication platforms cannot categorically satisfy that definition regardless of the specific content accessed on them. The Commission should not disturb a considered, fifteen-year-old interpretation absent a clear statutory basis for doing so, and none has been identified in the NPRM.

G. Mandatory Screen-Time Monitoring Raises Serious Student-Privacy Concerns the NPRM Does Not Address

Any regime capable of enforcing per-student or per-device screen-time limits would necessarily require tracking individual students' network usage patterns over time, including on personal devices if the broader reading of CIPA described above were adopted. That kind of monitoring implicates the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, 20 U.S.C. § 1232g, and, where devices or platforms are used by children under 13, the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, 15 U.S.C. §§ 6501–6506, as well as the substantial body of state student-data-privacy law enacted in the years since CIPA was written. The NPRM does not analyze how a Commission-mandated screen-time tracking regime would be reconciled with these overlapping privacy frameworks, nor who would bear liability for a resulting data breach or misuse of the resulting usage records. Before the Commission considers conditioning E-Rate funding on the collection of this kind of usage data, it should develop a full record on these privacy and data-security implications — a record the current NPRM does not contain.

IV. THE COMMISSION'S FIVE CORE LINES OF INQUIRY WOULD, AS FRAMED, RISK SPECIFIC NEGATIVE OUTCOMES FOR THE PROGRAM

The Commission's own Fact Sheet distills the proceeding into five lines of inquiry. Each tracks the concerns addressed above, but each also carries a distinct, foreseeable risk to the program that warrants separate attention.

A. “Whether the E-Rate Program Should Be Narrowed or Reoriented to Meet the Policy Goals Congress Intended When It Established the Program”

Framing the inquiry around what Congress “intended... when it established the program” in 1996 invites the Commission to freeze E-Rate's mission at a thirty-year-old snapshot of dial-up-era connectivity, rather than the evolving “advanced telecommunications and information services” standard Congress actually wrote into Section 254(h). The negative outcome is concrete: if the Commission “reorients” the program around a narrow, backward-looking definition of the original goal, it could declare categories of support that schools and libraries now depend on — cybersecurity protections for internal networks, cloud-delivered services, managed Wi-Fi, bandwidth sufficient for one-to-one device programs — to be outside that original intent and therefore ineligible, even though those needs did not exist in 1996 precisely because the technology did not exist. A reorientation exercise conducted this way would not modernize the program; it would shrink it by definitional fiat, cutting off exactly the categories of support that keep initial connectivity useful over time.

B. “Actions to Ensure the E-Rate Program Advances Student Learning Outcomes and Better Protects Online Safety... Including by Limiting Screen Time”

This inquiry would convert E-Rate, for the first time, from an infrastructure-cost subsidy into an outcomes-conditioned grant. E-Rate has never required applicants to demonstrate a causal link between subsidized connectivity and measurable gains in student achievement, because no such link is administrable at the level of an individual funding request — too many other variables affect learning outcomes for connectivity spending alone to be isolated as the cause. Conditioning funding on “advancing learning outcomes” would require new testing, reporting, and audit infrastructure that applicants must build and fund themselves, with real risk of funding denial or clawback based on outcome metrics a district cannot control. Layering a screen-time limitation on top of that condition compounds the harm described in Section III above: instead of a CIPA compliance question, screen time would become a funding-eligibility question, meaning a disputed interpretation of “excessive” use could jeopardize a district's entire E-Rate discount, not merely trigger a corrective action.

C. “Whether E-Rate-Funded Networks Are Being Used for Educational Purposes”

The existing educational-purpose certification already accomplishes the legitimate goal this inquiry describes. Reopening it as a standalone audit-and-enforcement focus — particularly alongside the NPRM's separate suggestion that the Commission reverse the longstanding presumption that on-campus activity is educational, NPRM ¶ 15 — would require schools and libraries to document, activity by activity, that every use of a network qualifies as educational. That documentation burden falls hardest on libraries, whose statutory mission includes general public information access that goes beyond K-12 curriculum, and it creates a strong incentive for risk-averse administrators to restrict beneficial but hard-to-document uses — professional development, social-emotional learning tools, patron research, extracurricular use during non-instructional hours — simply to avoid audit exposure. The negative outcome is a program that technically funds more narrowly defined “education” while functionally reducing the everyday utility of the connectivity it subsidizes.

D. “Whether the Commission's Current Interpretation of CIPA Is the Best Reading... and Whether Existing CIPA Requirements Sufficiently Protect Children”

As explained in Sections III.E and III.F above, revisiting the Commission's settled reading of “its computers” to reach personal and third-party devices, and revisiting the 2011 finding that social media is not per se harmful to minors, both risk stretching CIPA past content-based filtering into duration- and platform-based regulation the statute's text does not support. The second half of this inquiry — whether existing protections are “sufficient” — invites new mandated supervision and content-reporting requirements, NPRM ¶ 22, on top of the filtering CIPA already requires. Because compliance costs for new monitoring and reporting infrastructure do not scale with district size, the negative outcome falls disproportionately on small, rural, and high-poverty applicants with the least IT staff capacity to implement them. There is also a well-documented collateral effect: schools already over-filter relative to what CIPA requires, out of an abundance of caution; instructing the Commission to consider whether current protections are “sufficient” signals more aggressive filtering expectations still, which predictably blocks legitimate research, reference, and educational content along with the material CIPA is actually meant to address.

E. “Legal and Policy Considerations for Assessing Children's Screen Time and Empowering Parents, Guardians, and Teachers in Decision-Making”

Empowering parents and teachers is, in the abstract, an uncontroversial goal, but the specific mechanism the NPRM contemplates — a Commission-mandated opt-out regime for screen-based instruction, NPRM ¶ 21 — would require schools to build individualized tracking, notice, and accommodation systems keyed to each enrolled child, then reconcile those systems against the instructional software and platforms actually used classroom by classroom. That is a significant new administrative undertaking with no dedicated funding mechanism attached to it, and one that could conflict with state-level digital-learning and curriculum mandates that already govern the same instructional choices. A federal opt-out condition imposed through E-Rate funding eligibility, rather than through ordinary state and local education policymaking, risks years of inconsistent implementation and potential preemption disputes between the Commission and state education authorities — disputes that do little to protect children and divert resources better spent on the connectivity the program is designed to provide.

VI. THE CONSULTANT-OVERSIGHT AND ADMINISTRATIVE-STREAMLINING PROPOSALS ARE WELL-INTENTIONED BUT, AS DRAFTED, RISK REDUCING ACCESS FOR THE APPLICANTS WHO NEED THE PROGRAM MOST

The FNPRM half of this proceeding proposes (1) a new consultant registration, certification, and fee-restriction regime, and (2) several administrative changes intended to streamline processing, including a codified June 30 deadline for the FCC Form 473 and an overhaul of the FCC Form 479 consortium-certification process. The Commission's interest in preventing waste, fraud, and abuse is legitimate, and the commenter does not oppose oversight as a goal. But several of the specific mechanisms proposed would predictably fall hardest on small, rural, and under-resourced applicants and the consultants who serve them — the same population the rest of this proceeding purports to protect — and the Commission should recalibrate them accordingly.

A. The Consultant Registration Database's Personal Data Collection Would Deter the Volunteer and Semi-Retired Consultants Small Districts Rely On

The proposal would require every individual consultant to submit a full name, home address, personal phone number and email, and date of birth and the last four digits of a Social Security number to a new USAC-managed database before that person could so much as log into EPC on an applicant's behalf. NPRM ¶¶ 55–56. Many of the consultants who serve the smallest and most rural districts are not large national firms; they are semi-retired former technology directors, part-time community volunteers, or small local practitioners who help a handful of districts navigate the program's paperwork, often for a modest compensation. Requiring that population to surrender personal identifying information to a federal database, and to complete mandatory annual anti-fraud training on pain of being locked out of every E-Rate system until it is done, NPRM ¶ 55, adds a real compliance barrier for exactly the people small districts can least afford to lose. The predictable outcome is fewer available consultants in the areas that already have the thinnest bench of in-house E-Rate expertise, not better outcomes for applicants.

B. Banning Percentage-Based Consultant Fees Would Raise Upfront Costs Precisely for the Districts Least Able to Pay Them

The NPRM proposes a strict prohibition on any consultant fee arrangement based on a percentage of the applicant's E-Rate contract or disbursement amount. NPRM ¶ 59. Contingency-style fee arrangements exist because many low-income and rural applicants cannot pay a consultant's hourly or flat fee out of a constrained local budget before E-Rate funds are ever disbursed; a percentage-of-recovery fee lets the applicant obtain expert help without an upfront cash outlay. Prohibiting that arrangement does not eliminate the underlying budget constraint — it simply forces the poorest applicants either to pay consultants out of pocket in advance, forgo consulting assistance altogether and navigate an intricate application process without expert help, or decline to pursue funding they are otherwise eligible for. A categorical ban, without a income- or budget-based accommodation, risks widening the gap between well-resourced districts that can pay upfront and the high-poverty districts the discount matrix is specifically designed to prioritize.

C. Personal Civil, Criminal, and Debarment Exposure for Consultants Would Shrink the Consultant Pool and Raise Costs Program-Wide

The proposed rules expose individual consultants to fine, forfeiture, imprisonment, False Claims Act liability, and personal suspension and debarment for errors on the new consultant certification form. NPRM ¶ 52; proposed 47 C.F.R. § 54.517. Independent consultants and small consulting practices typically do not carry the legal infrastructure, insurance, or in-house compliance staff that larger firms use to manage that kind of personal liability exposure. Faced with that risk, rational consultants will either raise their fees to price in the new liability, decline to serve smaller or higher-risk applicants where documentation practices are less mature, or exit the E-Rate consulting market altogether. Any of those outcomes reduces the availability and affordability of exactly the expertise that the Commission's own oversight proposals assume will still be there to help applicants comply.

D. Requiring a New Form 5654 From Every Applicant, Even Those Without a Consultant, Adds a Universal Compliance Burden With a Severe Penalty for Delay

Because the proposal requires applicants and service providers who use no consultant at all to still file the new certification form attesting to that fact, NPRM ¶ 48, every one of the program's thousands of applicants — not just those working with consultants — would face a new annual filing obligation. USAC would hold or reject other pending E-Rate forms until the Form 5654 is filed, NPRM ¶ 51, meaning a routine administrative lapse having nothing to do with fraud could delay or jeopardize a district's entire funding application for the year. A universal new filing requirement, with an all-or-nothing enforcement mechanism tied to a district's core funding request, is a disproportionate way to address a problem that, by the Commission's own account, is caused by a subset of bad actors rather than by applicants generally.

E. Ending the “Kalamazoo” Exception Without a Transition Mechanism Would Disrupt Applicants Relying on State Master Contracts

Eliminating the long-standing exception that allows an existing, un-bid contract to be memorialized through a subsequent Form 470 process, NPRM ¶ 62, would require every applicant using that exception to run a full new competitive bidding cycle and sign a new contract after the resulting Allowable Contract Date. The NPRM itself acknowledges this may affect applicants relying on state master contracts and asks whether a carve-out is needed, NPRM ¶ 62, which signals that the Commission has not yet resolved how this change interacts with procurement vehicles many states specifically built to let schools and libraries obtain lower prices without individually bidding every contract. Absent a clear transition mechanism, ending the exception on the timeline proposed would force applicants who did nothing wrong into costly, time-consuming re-procurement simply because the vehicle they lawfully used no longer qualifies.

F. Restructuring the Form 479 Consortium Process Could Delay Funding for the Entire Consortium Over One Member's Late Filing

The proposal would require every individual consortium member to independently submit an expanded Form 479 — now carrying the full certification set from the Form 471 — inside EPC before the consortium lead can certify the consortium's Form 471. NPRM ¶ 68. Consortia exist largely so that small, rural, and otherwise under-resourced districts and libraries can pool purchasing power and share a single, more sophisticated applicant's administrative capacity rather than each navigating the program alone. Sequencing the entire consortium's funding request behind the slowest member's individual certification introduces a single point of failure: one member's delay, error, or unfamiliarity with the new EPC certification process could hold up funding for every other member of the consortium, including districts that did everything correctly and on time. That risk falls disproportionately on the smallest, least experienced members that consortium arrangements are meant to help.

G. Capping Reseller Markups Could Reduce the Number of Bidders Willing to Serve High-Cost Rural Markets

The NPRM floats capping reimbursement at or near underlying carrier or manufacturer cost when a Form 470 draws only one bid or none. NPRM ¶ 72. Single- or no-bid outcomes are most common precisely in the rural, high-cost markets the discount matrix already recognizes as needing the greatest support, often because only one or two providers are willing to serve those areas at all given the cost of extending service there. Capping the margin available to a reseller or provider serving those markets does not create additional competition; it risks removing the economic incentive for any provider to bid at all, leaving the highest-cost rural applicants with fewer options, not better pricing. The Commission should weigh that risk carefully before adopting a uniform cap that was not calibrated to reflect the different cost structures of competitive urban markets versus thin, high-cost rural ones.

VII. CONCLUSION

The Commission's stated interest in guarding against waste, fraud, and abuse in the E-Rate program is a legitimate one, and the commenter does not oppose reasonable oversight of consultants or reasonable administrative streamlining as general goals. As detailed in Section VI, however, several of the specific mechanisms proposed — personal data collection from small and volunteer consultants, a categorical ban on contingency fee arrangements, personal liability exposure sized for large firms rather than sole practitioners, a universal new filing requirement with an all-or-nothing enforcement trigger, an unresolved transition away from state master contracts, a consortium certification sequence with a single point of failure, and an uncalibrated cap on reseller margins in thin rural markets — would predictably fall hardest on the smallest, poorest, and most rural applicants the program exists to serve. The sunset and screen-time proposals addressed in Sections II through V are different in kind and warrant outright rejection: sunsetting or fundamentally restructuring E-Rate would require the Commission to declare that Congress's ongoing statutory mandate under Section 254(h) has been satisfied and may now be withdrawn — a determination the statute's text does not support and that courts are increasingly unwilling to accept from agencies absent clear congressional authorization — while regulating screen time, whether through CIPA or through some freestanding authority the NPRM cannot itself identify, would require the Commission to act as a national curriculum regulator, displacing the local school boards and library authorities to whom Congress expressly assigned that role. For the foregoing reasons, the commenter respectfully requests that the Commission: (1) decline to adopt rules narrowing, limiting, or sunsetting the E-Rate program; (2) decline to adopt any rule imposing screen-time limits, mandatory opt-out regimes, or expanded CIPA obligations tied to the duration or manner of instructional screen use; and (3) revise the consultant-oversight and administrative-streamlining proposals to account for their disproportionate impact on small, rural, and under-resourced applicants before adopting them in final form.

Respectfully submitted,

Jill Stone and Devrie Prouty