Sold to voters as a way to cut “waste, fraud, and abuse,” a more honest assessment of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) is that it’s just a Big Brazen Bid to shred the social safety net.
Naturally, the looming cuts to Medicaid and what they will mean for rural hospitals in particular has received the most press. But there are numerous other ways those in need of government assistance will be further pressed into poverty, including through a particularly narrow-minded Sophie’s Choice: internet access or food?
Last year, GOP leaders blocked bipartisan efforts to fund an extension of the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), which offered 23 million eligible households a $30-per-month voucher to help pay for internet service. As if letting the ACP die wasn’t a big enough blow, OBBBA not only increases the paperwork burden required to qualify for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, it completely removes internet service costs as an eligible deduction.
In the context of SNAP, the “deduction” refers to how an eligible household’s net income is calculated, which is then used to determine how much households are entitled to receive in SNAP benefits. A lower net income translates into a higher allocation of benefits. Section 10005 of the law prohibits “household internet costs (e.g., monthly subscriber fees)” from being used in the net income calculation. That means that families with internet access will have higher net incomes, and therefore get lower benefits.
“Fundamentally, the SNAP benefit calculation is about calculating what the household has available for food. That’s why rent and utilities are factored in,” explained Katie Bergh, senior policy analyst with the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities’ (CBPP) Food Assistance team.
Contrast this change to 2019, when the first Trump administration sought to establish federal “Standard Utility Allowances” across every state. At that time, internet service was considered to be an essential utility—and that was before the COVID lockdowns turned internet access for all into one of the most bipartisan goals in all of politics.
But under OBBBA, and contrary to common sense, internet access is no longer considered essential, at least not for SNAP beneficiaries, despite repeated campaign promises to “make America affordable again” and to bring prices down “starting on Day 1.”
Overall, as Bergh and two of her CBPP colleagues analyzed, more than 1 million children will see food assistance to their families cut substantially or terminated as a result of OBBBA’s SNAP reductions.
The internet-or-food provision is completely disconnected from the lived experience of those who require both.
But in addition, at a time when internet connectivity is a must to meaningfully participate in the economy, Bergh told me that for SNAP recipients who manage to not get kicked off the program, they would receive a lower SNAP benefit if they have home internet service.
“The CBO [Congressional Budget Office] estimates that it would be about $10 [less] a month. And the impact is a pretty significant number of households: 65 percent of SNAP households, which is about 13 million households,” Bergh explained, adding that of $186 billion in cuts to the SNAP program over the next decade, $11 billion of that is from eliminating internet costs from the Standard Utility Allowance.
Add to that the new, more stringent work requirements for SNAP recipients and you’ll begin to see how the internet-or-food provision is completely disconnected from the lived experience of those who require both. Do you want your child to have two extra meals a month, or have internet access for schoolwork?
“In 2025, internet service is essential for employment and education. It’s even more essential [for those on SNAP] to document their hours, potentially through online tools and definitely in seeking employment,” Bergh said. “We have certainly seen access to benefits increasingly move online and, in some states, they have closed human services offices in some communities.”
Former FCC nominee and now executive director of the American Association for Public Broadband Gigi Sohn puts it in even more stark terms. “Internet access is not a luxury, it’s a lifeline. Stripping internet costs from SNAP eligibility calculations effectively forces low-income Americans to choose between staying connected and putting food on the table,” she told me. “We should be expanding digital access, not punishing those who can least afford to lose it.”
YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE A BROADBAND POLICY EXPERT to understand just how myopic it is to make it more difficult for financially strapped households to afford internet service. The fallout of the now-defunct Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) was a proxy. Nearly all of the same households that qualified for SNAP also qualified for the ACP.
A recently published Benton Institute for Broadband & Society study examined the fallout from the demise of the ACP, finding through interviews with program participants that it “created costs and tensions for beneficiaries that went beyond their losing the $30-per-month service subsidy.”
“When the ACP program ended, the question for most people was not whether to keep service but how to keep it while juggling other household needs,” Benton Senior Policy Fellow John Horrigan, the study’s author, writes.
The “how” typically meant downgrading service, creating a cascade of additional challenges. “Downgraded plans meant slower service, with the end result that not everyone in the household could be online at the same time,” the report explains. “Homework might unfold in shifts to take into account multiple students or a parent needing to work at home. Telehealth sessions might stall or drop … Those households had to absorb the costs (sometimes through taking on part-time work such as DoorDash delivery or housecleaning) or cut back elsewhere.”
The new burdens of searching for the most affordable plans, fitting it into strapped household budgets, and rationing access created “a tax on former ACP recipients’ time,” Horrigan writes.
The study also captured something that contrasts chain saw–wielding OBBBA proponents, who claim that all these social safety net cuts are about “saving” taxpayer dollars.
One analysis showed that the ACP subsidy returned $2 in benefit for every $1 spent on the subsidy, yielding $16.2 billion in annual benefits in the form of greater access to employment options and greater convenience. Another analysis showed that for health care alone, the ACP created between $28.9 billion and $29.5 billion in annual savings.
That’s just the data. But when it’s downloaded into everyday lives, that’s where the human toll comes into view.
“Especially being in the area that we’re in, there isn’t many options as far as internet, so we’re kind of just stuck. And my bill has more than doubled since it [ACP] ended. I don’t really have a choice. I live in an apartment building where I don’t have any choice about what my internet provider is,” said one former ACP beneficiary surveyed for the Benton study.
“I have very limited mobility. I’m bedridden. I have a live-in caregiver. I have a lot of telehealth visits, and the quality of the visit is not good. Sometimes I can’t hear them, they can’t hear me. Most times the session drops.”
It’s always been expensive to be poor. OBBBA just made it more costly. In a short six months, we’ve gone from the aspirations of “internet for all” to exacerbating the digital divide for generations to come, just as AI and internet access have become central to Americans’ economic prospects. Is this what makes America great again?
This story has been updated to reflect new estimates of the final version of OBBBA.