At the beginning of his three-year federal prison sentence for felony tax evasion, Roger Shoffstall lost his telephone privileges when a guard caught him running his small Alaska phone company from behind bars.

He’s lost a lot of privileges over the years. Shoffstall, 75, can’t serve on a federal jury. Unlike most Alaskans, he doesn’t receive an annual Permanent Fund dividend check. And he is not allowed to own a gun.

One thing never changes, however: Each year, the federal government sends his company, Summit Telephone, more than $1 million.

The money comes from a special government subsidy program that Congress created to bring fast, affordable phone and internet service to hard-to-reach places. You help pay for it.

Pull up your latest phone bill and look for a line labeled “Universal Service Fund.” Some phone companies list it as a “Universal Connectivity Charge” or fold it into a “Regulatory Programs & Telco Recovery Fee.” It’s all the same thing: a surcharge added to the monthly bill of phone customers throughout the United States.

The federal government and phone companies don’t call it a tax — but it acts like one. Carriers must currently contribute 37 cents of every dollar of their interstate and international phone revenues to the fund.

In Alaska, where many communities can only be reached by plane or boat, the Federal Communications Commission has given telecommunications companies $4.6 billion in these subsidies since 2016. That’s more than $600 per Alaskan per year. More per resident than in any other state.

Yet after all that spending, Alaska still ranks near the bottom for access to the very land-based, high-speed internet service the money was meant to deliver.

Some communities have yet to be wired at all. In others, fiber-optic cables or microwave towers offer internet with speeds that were recently clocked, statewide, as the slowest in the country. Even with the subsidies, the service comes at a steep price to customers: often hundreds of dollars a month for internet one-tenth what the FCC considers broadband quality.

The federal program has kept money flowing to companies like Shoffstall’s whose operators have troubled pasts. It also gives money to companies like Shoffstall’s regardless of how many people use their services. And fewer and fewer Alaskans have done so since low-earth satellites from Starlink entered the market at better prices. (Satellite internet doesn’t qualify for the subsidy but costs about $90 to $130 per month for download speeds up to 280 megabits per second in the same service area as Summit Telephone. According to Summit’s website, its fastest internet plan in the same region maxes out at 25 Mbps and costs $135 a month.)

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All of these excesses appear to fall within the program’s rules or the FCC’s discretion.

A telecom on the Aleutian island of Adak receives more than $350,000 a year to provide phone and low-speed internet services to 306 buildings, according to FCC records, even though the state Department of Labor says the island is home to fewer than 80 people. One business owner said everyone he knows on the island has moved on to Starlink anyway.

GCI, the state’s largest telecom and its largest subsidy recipient, got $466 million just two years after its settlement with the federal government for alleged fraud related to the same subsidy program. (The settlement said it was neither an admission of guilt by GCI nor a concession by the Justice Department that the claims were not well founded.)

Shoffstall and his attorney did not respond to repeated interview requests or answer detailed questions sent by email. On Thursday, Shoffstall sent two documents to the Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica asserting that he is a sovereign citizen of the United States, an ideology that the FBI has described as “those who believe that even though they physically reside in this country, they are separate or ‘sovereign’ from the United States.” The FBI has categorized the extremist version of this movement as “domestic terrorism.”

Larry Mayes, the owner of Adak Eagle Enterprises, the company that receives the subsidy to provide internet on Adak, declined to answer questions about the funding. “You’ll have to talk to the FCC about that,” he said, hanging up the phone.

In a written response to questions, GCI said it and other Alaska telecoms depend heavily on the subsidies to provide services across the state.

“Before and after the settlement, GCI continued to work with the FCC and customers to provide high-quality communications services in compliance with all applicable laws and regulations,” the GCI statement said. “The settlement did not change Alaskans’ growing demand for these services, GCI’s willingness to provide them, or the criticality of USF funding to the sustainability of those services.”

The FCC did not respond to requests for comment. The agency is weighing the future of the program and recently circulated a proposal to overhaul or potentially sunset elements of the subsidy that funds companies like Summit.

Alaska telecom lobbyists and executives said that the state provides some of the most challenging geography to serve in the United States, and that they have made great progress in bringing internet access to Alaska.

Christine O’Connor, executive director of the Alaska Telecom Association, said the subsidies have improved access and lowered costs for rural........

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