Everything. But as mordecai reminded her, we all are are an obligation to do our part when danger gathers. And those of us with power or influence have a special responsibility to do whats right. As ellie elie said, silence encourages the tormenter, never the tormented. So, my friends, let us never be neutral or silent in the face of bigotry. Together lets defend the shared values that already make america and israel great. [applause] let us do the hard work necessary to keep building our friendship and reach out to the next generation of americans and israelis so the bonds between our nations grow even deeper and stronger. [cheers and applause] we are stronger together, and if we face the future side by side, i know for both israel and america our best days are still ahead. [cheers and applause] thank you so much [cheers and applause] 234rb. Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes our morning program. Please turn your attention to the screens for an important programming update. Finish. We will leave this here, and if you missed any of the speeches from this mornings aipac conference, you can find them all online in the cspan video library. Go to cspan. Org. And we will be back at the conference this afternoon for republican president ial candidates john kasich, donald trump and ted cruz. We will have their remarks live starting at 5 p. M. Eastern here on cspan2. And also live today a discussion on Monetary Policy and how the u. S. Might respond in the event of another recession. The Brookings Institution is the host of this event. Speakers include former Treasury Department officials. Thatll be live at 2 p. M. Eastern also here on cspan2. Booktvs in prime time on cspan2 starting tonight at 8 30 eastern. Each night well feature a series of programs on topics ranging from politics and education to medical care and national security. Plus encore presentations from recent book festivals. Tune in for booktv in prime time this week on cspan2. Go to booktv. Org for the complete schedule. And this week on the communicators, a discussion of the federal governments Lifeline Program which is administered by the federal Communications Commission. Joining us are two guests to discuss this, Amina Fazlullah is policy director at the Benton Foundation, and daniel lyons is with American EnterpriseInstitutes Center for Internet Communications and technology. Hes a visiting scholar there from boston college. Amina fazlullah, what is this Lifeline Program . How did it come about . Guest so the Lifeline Program actually came about during the Reagan Administration in order to provide a subsidy to make sure that low income persons that have access to voice service, Telephone Service. And, you know, this comes from the notion that having everyone on the network, having access to public safety, having access to each other in commerce is incredibly important. And for low income persons, making sure that they had Additional Support to do that seemed necessary, and so thats where the program began. Host and how many people participate in this program . Guest as of this past year, about 13 million. Host and whats the cost . Guest well, so the cost of the program is, so its a 9. 25 subsidy per household host 9 at any. 25 . Guest thats right. Host okay. Guest so its a relatively minimal subsidy, and the cost has gone down over the past few years in terms of the overall cost for the Lifeline Program within the total universal service fund. Host and is it specifically for wire phones . Or is it now wireless as well . Guest so currently, so as i said, president reagan, during the Reagan Administration the telephone voice wired service began, and then after the Bush Administration they introduced wireless. And so as it stands today theres wired and Wireless Voice available within the program. Host daniel lyons, has it been successful n your view . Guest so its not clear what the successful, what the success rate of lifeline is, and i think thats part of one of the problems with the program as it exists now. More or less as a political compromise between the carriers and the fcc when the government broke up the at t monopoly. And part of the concern was were going to establish this amount that were going to give to low income consumers with the goal of making sure that low income consumers can get access to Telephone Service. But no ones ever really done the study to figure out whether the amount that were giving is actually going toward people who would otherwise not fall off the telecommunication grid. Right . So the gao issued a report just last year that criticized the fcc for this purpose. So i think theres a bipartisan support for the idea that low income households should have some assistance to make sure theyre not falling off the grid and make sure that they take advantage of the latest telecommunications systems. The concern is whether lifeline is actually achieving that. When the gao asked the fcc for some evidence that lifeline is successful, the fcc pointed to an academic report that suggested it might be as much as 88 of lifeline dollars are flowing to households that would have Telephone Service even without the subsidy. Host how is it funded . Guest its funded by the universal service charge, right . The monthly tax on your wireless bill or your landline phone bill. And the way its calculated is that the fcc estimates how much its going to need per year and then divides it over interstate telecommunications revenue, so Long Distance revenue largely. And so the numerator divided by the denominator gives a percentage that then gets charge today the carriers and is passed to you and me, the consumers. Host amina fad lula, has it been successful in your view . Guest i think the program has been successful. I agree that it would be better for the fcc to take steps, i think, to understand the population better and understand the impact of the program. And not have to rely on third party reports. But i do think the program is successful, and id like to step back just for a moment for us to understand who were talking about in terms of who the users are. So the Lifeline Program is restricted to folks who earn about 135 of the poverty line or lower. So for a family of four in the contiguous 48, thats about 32,000 a year. And if you live in a city like des moines, so this isnt san francisco, its not new york, it costs about 63,000 a year for you to meet your average expenses for a family of four. So they are struggling. Theyre definitely well below, theyve got well below what they need per year in terms of income, and to there are times where theyre going to make decisions like should i pay the phone bill or should i get food . Should i get food or should i get medicine . So folks do fall on and off. I think everybody understands today low income or high income, that broadband and Telephone Service is incredibly important, so people try to make that work because its a necessary be tool for their lives. Necessary tool for their lives. But when youre looking at the numbers, its really, really difficult to even conceive of how these families are going to be able to meet their needs and stay on, you know, a high cost Subscriber Program like broadband or like Telephone Service without the support. So i think that, you know, understanding the struggles that these families are facing, lifeline has done a really great job of stepping in, providing a support thats going to be there for them continuously. Host well, the fcc in their march meeting will be talking about the Lifeline Program, and to get some more perspective on that, lets bring Brendan Sasso of the National Journal in on the conversation as well. Thanks, peter. The fcc is set later this month to vote on big changes for the Lifeline Program, the biggest that theyre going to include the Broadband Internet service so that people with can use that subsidy not just for their cell phone or landline, but for Internet Access at home or a data package for their cell phone. My question is whether you both think that the 9. 25 is enough. I mean, i know that most people, it costs a lot more than that to get Home Broadband connection or a data plan for family. So is that enough to encourage people to adopt broadband if they werent otherwise . Guest i mean, i think that its a good first step. And i think that the fcc is going to be making a lot of changes to this program and moving in a deliberate fashion makes sense. There are programs that are out currently that are not part of usf that are available to low income families that are coming in right around that 10 mark. There are a lot of other costs that are required to be able to access the internet, so youre going to have to have a device, potentially access to training and support. And there are programs out there to support low income families so that they have access to all those pieces. So 9. 25, i think, is a good place to start. But i think its yet to be seen whether or not9 thats going to be enough going forward. Guest and my concern is path dependency, right . So where the 925 comes from is what we 9. 25 comes from is we give that to telephones, why not extend that out. They havent done a real study to suggest that these are the drivers that are keeping low income people from adopting Broadband Service, and this is the amount were going to need. We dont know if we need 9 million a month for ten Million People or 45 a month for two Million People, right . The fcr simply hasnt done fcc simply hasnt done that level of an us. We had a series of trial that is the fcc adopted in 2012, and the goal was to try to provide some data but, unfortunately, they were not designed in a way that had measurable output results and the sample sizes wound up being too small. The one thing we did learn, i think, from those trials is that the higher the subsidy, the more the uptake rate which suggests that, in fact, 9 a month is probably too low when you talk about broadband prices at 50, 60, 70 a month, its not clear that giving a 9 discount is going to be enough to incentivize people to suddenly make that room in their budget. One thing that i think the interesting about the fccs proposal is that it would phase out support for mobile voiceonly. So im wondering maybe there are some people, maybe elderly especially, who maybe just dont want to get broadband and maybe they like the fact that theyre able to get Free Cell Phone Service right now. Is it a concern that those people wont be potentially supported under the program anymore . Guest there is a, i think as of right now it looks like a threeyear phaseout. And theres definitely concern how this Consumer Population is going to shift from having a product that was focused on voice and now a product that theyre used to using to a product that might have some component of voice as well as some component of data or a different device completely. So from a feature phone to a smartphone. So its going to take, i think, a careful approach by the fcc to transition those folks. But i think we all understand the benefits of making sure that everyone has access to broadband. So its a difficult, i think its a difficult role for the fcc to play. You know, they want own courage the modernization to encourage the modernization of the program, and they definitely dont want anybody left behind because theyre not quite ready go ahead. Host in a especially, is this a back door reform of the universal service fund . Guest well, its one step among many that the fccs taken over the years to try to transition the universal service fund from a telephonebased program to a broadbandbased program. Theres Additional Support that the fcc provides for rural areas in what are called the High Cost Fund to help cover carriers that provide service in places with not a lot of people. And the fccs transitioned that slowly to broadband as well. But i think part of the problem with taking the old telephone system and simply moving it to broadband is we replicate some of the errors and some of the difficulties that we had in the old system. I think what makes more sense is for the fcc to rethink this from ground zero rather than have this evolutionary change of universal service to think from the ground up. If i was starting at zero and designing a system today to provide broadband support, how would i do it . Host and how would you do it . Guest so with regard to lifeline in particular, i think what makes sense is some sort of a voucher system, right . Something that is direct and portable which is a language that president obama used in his recent Connectall Initiative. And i think it makes a lot of sense for the fcc to figure out, first of all, what are the drivers of low broadband adoption. Unlike Telephone Service, right . Its not just the monthly fee that is a problem. You can have free broadband, but if you dont have a computer, for example, thats problematic, right . So i think a holistic approach would involve not just a subsidy for monthly service, but some type of subsidy to get computers in the hands of eligible recipients. And also some digital outreach so when we do surveys about why people who are not on broadband have chosen not to, a lot of them say we just dont think we need to be on the internet. Theres going to be groups of people that are never going to adopt at any price, right . But for those that simply dont appreciate everything that you can get from a broadband subscription, a Digital LiteracyOutreach Program is, i think, a critical component. And i would fund them in very different ways as well. Host and you would fund it how . Guest so rather than use the universal service Fund Mechanism which is problematic, a, because until recently there wasnt a budget on the program and, b, its growing exponentially so that the usf surcharge was 3 investor in 1998, its now 18 now which is pretty close to that tax that they put on hotels for suckers who are coming in from out of town, right . I think what makes sense is it for simply to be a line item in the federal budget just like any other subsidy program, something thats subject to congressional oversight, that has a hard cap, that forces the program to figure out how you use these dollars most efficiently to get people on the grid. And maybe even, dare i say, move it out of the fcc and over to Something Like hhs or another agency that has a better understanding of poverty issues. One of the critiques of the universal service fund over the past 20 years is that its focused much more on the needs of carriers than on the needs of the consumers its serving. And its not a surprise given the carriers are a large constituency for the federal Communications Commission as an agency. Host Amina Fazlullah, has the usf worked, in your view, as a funding mechanism . Guest i think the usf program has worked for many years now. I think its at a crossroads where were going to have to consider, you know, how we contribute to that program as more consumers migrate from traditional Telephone Service which is sort of in voice service, the traditional base of where the usf dollars come from and go to broadband and voiceover ip and start to migrate to other types of services. So thats got to be considered, and i think thats sort of the next step for the fcc. So they, you know, as you said, you know, weve seen each piece of the usf fund get upgraded and modernized. So it began with high cost which turned into the connect america fund to be focused on broadband. I think that was the right step to take. I think the laws that are written around usf are flexible enough to allow for these changes to occur, and is so they are actually taking the initiative to make that happen. We saw the upgrade of erate. I think that was a really exciting moment. And we saw the president come out with connect ed to support the steps that the fcc was taking. But they also pushed for steps from department of education as well as the fcc. So it wasnt, you know, this onestep process where, you know, we hope that erate can do it all. We understand sort of the limitations of erate, and now were looking at lifeline. And lifeline, you know, i think is very focused on a cost subsidy for service. Its not going to be the program thats going to provide us with equipment or with digital training, and while these aspects are really important, you know, the fcc might not be the place to do all of those things in one setting. And lifeline is definitely not the program thats going to be able to handle all of those pieces as well. So i think what weve seen with the Connectall Initiative from the white house is acknowledgment that this is going to take many aspects of government working together to be able to actually close the Digital Divide and close these gaps. Glx next question, brendan saws toe. You had mentioned potentially where whether to expand broadband. I wonder if the goa