Milton Friedman famously wrote “nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.” Perhaps nowhere is his wisdom more obvious than with the Universal Service Fund, which, despite having vastly outlasted its intended purpose, some lawmakers are militantly intent on expanding rather than phasing out.

The Universal Service Fund is better known to us as one of several seemingly random fees tacked onto our phone bills each month. When the underlying framework was created by FDR in 1934, its purpose was to collect contributions from users of long-distance phone lines to build phone lines to places that didn’t have them yet. After that goal was accomplished, it was repurposed to subsidize broadband for consumers in high-cost areas and in schools and libraries.

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